


μήτηρ, in the Greek

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Hades (Video Game 2018)
Genre: Background Relationships, Backstory, Female Friendship, Grief/Mourning, Missing Scene, Motherhood, Multi, Sad with a Happy Ending, get in loser we're tackling unresolved issues with our mothers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-05
Updated: 2021-02-05
Packaged: 2021-03-13 15:55:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 36,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29031270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: She went first to the hives of Silence and requested from them their beeswax. Then she found where the clay men had hidden their newfound fire, and took from their hearth the smallest burning scrap, which she used to light a wick. As the wax melted down it, its layers dripped and hardened upon themselves, and when it lengthened into a shape she could carry in her arms, she the Night bent her head and kissed life into it. This became the infant she called Charon, half-melted and smoking Promethean fire with every breath.At the end of this recounting, she tilted her head and asked politely,Is this not how you have children?Uh, no,said Persephone.
Relationships: Nyx & Persephone (Hades Video Game)
Comments: 42
Kudos: 120





	1. The Bride

**Author's Note:**

> **Warnings** for the believed death of a child and subsequent mourning and a LOT of mom stuff.
> 
> All canonical pairings make their appearance. I didn't include them in the relationship tags because they aren't the focus. Let me know if this needs to be changed.
> 
> Did I crack open my copy of Edith Hamilton for this? Sure did not. Is any of the mythology right? I have no idea. *hands you a folded note that says, "I wrote amateur Percy Jackson fanfic as a kid and I can do what I want"*

*

*

*

μήτηρ, in the Greek  
by kaikamahine

*

*

*

**Persephone.**

The first year, above, the only thing that would grow was nettles.

There wasn’t a cottage yet, or even much of a garden. It was little more than a depression in a knoll, where the river bent back on itself. A small rise of grass, a hint of clover gone to seed, and the stump of a tree half-hanging over the water, to which Charon drew his boat up alongside and threw the lead line around. They bumped to a stop, and Persephone turned her head.

She had not felt true grass under her feet in aeons. She left her shoes in Charon’s boat and did not wait for him to offer her a hand before she hiked up her robe and stepped onto solid ground. Pebbles acted with immediate prejudice against the bare soles of her feet, but the grass beyond the bank was cool and wet. She stopped, and spread her toes in wonder. 

After a time, the cloth fell from her numb fingers, and dew soaked through her hem.

Behind her, she could hear the boatman Charon conversing with the god of the river. She knew nothing about him, save that he was some minor son of Nereus more freshwater rush than any real conscious entity. He wasn’t the type to cause trouble on purpose, and as far as Persephone knew that was the very first requirement for godhood. Charon must know many almost-gods like that, she realized, and many other places like this one.

Vaguely, she was aware that they were coming to an agreement. They would tie a knot in the river to remove this place from the world: any mortal sailing downriver would slip right over the knot without ever knowing that she was tucked underneath. It would fall right out of Olympian notice, and no chthonic casting its eye aboveground would recognize there was a space missing. She would be safe from discovery so long as she remained here.

Even more vaguely, she was aware that she was grateful for the effort and should probably say something to that effect, but the idea was too distant to matter much and the thought of reaching for it exhausted her. She laid down where she was.

Charon vocalized in her direction, worried.

_It’s all right,_ lied the goddess Persephone.

The sky above her sat hunched up and grey and uneven, like it had been spread on with a knife while still cold -- a winter sky, she supposed, but that made no sense, because the clover was late summer clover, with little white puffs like cottontails.

She tracked her eyes over it, contemplating this, as it went from light to dark and back again. When she sat up, she left a Persephone-shape in the frost.

Charon had long departed, of course, but her trunk had been carefully placed in the shelter of the overhang, along with all her urns and the thick chthonic blankets, neatly folded. One of the sacks had tipped over, and the pomegranates lay in the grass, a spill so deep and wine-dark it was shocking.

Persephone drew her knees up to her chest. She wept.

That first year, in that sheltered place, she drew out a lot and staked the ground and turned it over until the leeched soil gave way to dark and fresh, and she went out to collect the seeds from the hoarfrosted summer growth.

It mattered not what the seed was when she planted it. Only stinging nettle grew, small and twisted and barbed. She pricked her fingers harvesting it, and made nettle bread and nettle tea so bitter it stung her eyes.

You always reap what you sow, her mother had said, and that first year, surface-side, Persephone wept without ceasing like a river running and drank it all back down.

**Nyx.**

To make the first of her children, she the Night reached up a hand and pulled down the stars, so that comet trails made scratch marks the color of ichor against the uniform darkness. And so, within her daughters the Fates there always existed that freefall, that sense of height -- the inevitability that there was always somewhere further _down_ to go. 

To make her son Ixion, she dipped a hand into the cold, deep, relentless river of Time and plucked from it a stone, dotted green and lumpy and wholly unremarkable, until Nyx put her mouth to it and breathed life into it.

He grew teeth first, because so did they all, then webbed feet with which to swim the length of Time, and pulsing green lights on stalks to lure and warn in equal measure. These he discarded readily enough that Nyx began collecting them to use as lights for the rest of the nothingness. To this day, the House of Hades was lit by Ixion lights in their faceted jars.

_Is he still in the Underworld?_ asked her son Hypnos, tucked into her side. He rubbed at his eyes.

(Eyes, in Nyx’s opinion, were a relatively new invention, and brought more problems than solutions.)

_Who, my child?_

_Ixion._

But he was too sleepy to enunciate it clearly, mouth too big and unwieldy for his baby face, and when Nyx didn’t answer fast enough, his brow puckered worriedly.

_Is he going to gobble us up?_

_He is not going to gobble you up,_ she said, firmly. _For he is your brother and he knows I would be very disappointed in him should he ever try. He lives not in this realm, besides. Only his lights wash up here._

Many realms existed alongside the Underworld, for in the beginning her Progenitor had folded them out of nothing for her entertainment as easily as if they were blocks or paper stars. When Nyx had claimed the Underworld for her own she made sure to take its edges between her fingers and pinch them off, to keep its occupants safe and to keep the shades from slipping out, but those like Ixion the deeplight and his younger brother the harvester could move between them and that meant there were always gaps.

She came across one a century or two ago, and met a wolf from a realm long-abandoned, something that might have once been intended as a playmate for her and then discarded, as tall as her and built like a question, crooked and wanting. She hesitated to approach it, but it turned on her anyway; foam limned its jaws, its yellow eyes frenetic and darting.

It had gone for her throat without hesitation.

She manifested glass at the ends of her hands and pierced its chest through, but the moment stayed suspended inside of her; that high, thin, pure second of terror -- something so rare for a god to feel -- and it moved her so fiercely that she bent to the corpse and cut its heart from it and put it to her breast until it beat again. This became the infant she named Thanatos.

_That’s you!_ Hypnos whispered helpfully to the brother tucked under Nyx’s other arm.

She tapped the end of his nose with a fingertip, and his eyes crossed.

_You,_ she began, for he had been born in that space between realms, when the goddess Nyx had manifested herself the form of a giant spider, weaving pylons of steel upon which she planned to achor the House over the abyssal chasm of Tartarus. It had gotten too heavy for her to carry on her back anymore. Amid these she discovered a silk-wrapped pod and cracked it between her mandibles to find a child within.

This had been Hypnos, silk-fine and cocooned inside her own exhaustion.

_Okay, but what about me?_

The question came from the third child bouncing on the cushion beside her, irrepressible. The movement jostled Thanatos, who’d been so near sleep he sat up and frowned severely.

Nyx touched Zagreus’s shoulder to still him, saying, _Be conscientious of your brother, child._

_Sorry, Than._ He straightened his shoulders, and said, **μήτηρ,** with formality. _Mother, where did you find me?_

For a long moment, Nyx regarded him, silent.

Such was the pause that Thanatos opened both his yellow eyes to look at her, curious of the answer. He had been too young at the time to make the connection between the dead child taken away from the queen and the living one Nyx introduced them to later.

_You,_ she decided on eventually, _were carried the way a hard truth is, between the stomach and the heart, and like truths you could always be felt. I understand this is how mortals have their young, and you were born as they were, in blood. Thus, your blood bleeds red._

Young Zagreus contemplated this.

_That’s wicked,_ he declared, and beamed at her.

**Persephone.**

She arrived at the House of Hades concealed carefully in the crates of supplies that Lord Zeus had made such a blustering fuss about gifting to his brother in the Underworld, thus ensuring not one single being on Mount Olympus would be interested in their contents -- he could be very clever, Zeus could, but only at certain times, and only a few times a year.

She wondered how she was going to find someone when she got there, but she needn’t’ve worried: as almost as soon as she clambered out of her crate and stretched out her stiff spine a woman was there, as long and dark as the shadow a candlestick casts of itself. She was dressed in peplos and himation both, falling sheer to the ground, the indigo-dark hem spreading from shadow to shadow, so Persephone could not easily see where she began or ended. She ducked her head before her, uncertain.

_I am Nyx,_ said she, before Persephone had time to worry whether she should courtesy, and what form that would take. _Night incarnate. I am the House._

Not the house steward, she noted. Not the housekeeper. It was a full statement. I am the House.

_And you are the goddess Persephone._ Her accent wasn’t Olympian. It resonated like the hum of a beehive. _You are to be Lord Hades’s bride._

_I … suppose I am, yes,_ said Persephone in a small voice.

She stole a second look through her eyelashes. Everything about Nyx had a sharp edge to it, and though she would soon learn this was true for every chthonic being in the Underworld -- everything here had to be sharp, paneled, and glassine, in order to catch and reflect any fraction of the limited light -- she didn’t know that yet, and feared it for a warning: come close and be cut. She wore a collar of screaming mouths, dripping gemstones as big as her hand, and the underside of her hair glittered as flawless as the midnight sky.

Likewise -- rumpled from hiding in a crate, wearing only what she had retired to bed in to evade her mother’s notice -- Persephone suddenly felt very shabby, and ridiculous.

What did she think she was doing?

Oh how like an Olympian, to scheme without consideration.

_You want to be queen,_ she told herself silently and firmly, and drew back her shoulders. _Uncle Zeus promised you a kingdom._

Nyx watched her without blinking, then said, rather abruptly, _Forgive me, my manners are not what they ought be. I have only ever met one other Olympian. You are radiant to behold._

_Oh!_ said Persephone, in a completely different voice.

That first night -- or whenever, she realized very quickly that without the sun or moon to track she would be cut adrift in time until she adjusted -- she slept on a chaise in Nyx’s room.

_It shall be your room, now, as long as you need it,_ she was told.

The walls were much closer than she’d become accustomed to upon Olympus, with fewer columns -- no fresh air or light to let in, of course, but it was still a little jarring, to have come to expect it in her peripheral and now have it lacking -- but the rugs were thick and warm, and the furniture upholstered in exquisite brocade.

_But what about you?_

_I am of many consciousnesses,_ said Nyx, enigmatically. _And I am wherever a shadow touches. I have no need of a single habitation. You are not inconveniencing me._

_All right, if you’re sure._

That, Persephone realized, was going to be every bit as annoying coming from Nyx as it had from Athena; to have one’s insecurities bisected, judged, and worked around, before one was even aware of them.

The chaise was deep, plush, and purple, and the part of Persephone that had lived the beginning of her life as a mortal couldn’t help but evaluate the cost of a dye that dark. If it was just an accent piece, perhaps it wouldn’t be that strange, but everything in Nyx’s room was either violet or black -- an egregious show of wealth. Or maybe just godlike.

She woke again at an indeterminate time, and lifted her head to find the half-melted figure of a young man arranging a new bureau along the wall.

She sprung to her feet with a yelp, badly startling them both -- smoke gushed from his jaws before he gulped it back -- but before she could say anything, the shadows on the ceilings and walls bent forward and coalesced into Nyx’s shape.

_Be not alarmed. My son, Charon,_ she said, and the deity made a bashful, wordless noise and bowed -- 

\-- to _her._

No one had bowed to her since she was first declared a true goddess, and even that had been purely ceremonial.

Persephone pulled herself up sapling-straight and bowed back. _Charon. I am Persephone. I descended from Olympus to be Queen._

He touched a melted hand to the bureau and vented out another charred, burnt-up sound.

_Yes,_ she guessed. _I see that. It’s an excellent idea, I wouldn’t have thought of it myself. Thank you for your kindness._

His eyes crinkled, and behind her, Nyx made a curious noise.

**Nyx.**

Within the realm of the Underworld, there existed five divisions.

Each of these divisions hinged into each other at one point and one point only; each had a fearsome guard to stop unauthorized movement in or out, and the only ones who could travel freely were those who’d unlocked the Eldest Sigil -- a glorified administrative masterkey, in short -- or those gods whose natural talents inclined them towards the weirdways.

The deepest division was abyssal Tartarus, a land of many crevasses and sinkpits, where the souls of the damned were sent to be lost -- on purpose. On its jagged bedrock anchored the House of Hades. After it came Asphodel, whose fields had flooded with magma some centuries ago.

(In the privacy of her heart, Nyx suspected Charon. Not that he had caused it, for he was not like his sister Eris, called Strife, but merely that he had not prevented it. He had not been pleased with her at the time, or with Hades, and performed his duties in a manner that could only be called maliciously compliant.)

Above that: Elysium, which of all places in the Underworld most resembled the surface. The last division before the surface was the Temple, where the mortal river Archeron met the immortal waters of the Styx and began its downworld flow.

Inside these -- or beneath them, or around, dimensions mattered little -- was Erebus, where the dead were registered upon arrival, whether brought by Charon or Hermes or Thanatos.

They were the finest of Nyx’s creations, and she tended to them as one tends to a valuable, if multitudinal, collection of silver; it always seemed like as soon as she finished checking, polishing, and arranging, she had to start at the beginning and do it all over again.

And of one thing, Nyx was now entirely certain --

The House was failing.

Denying it would be irresponsible. The flooding of Asphodel had only been the most obvious sign, but Nyx, who saw all, knew the cracks were extensive and only grew larger with each passing age. Her efforts, tireless and unending though they were, were a delaying tactic only.

It hit her anew, the futility of it all, as she steadied a pillar in Tartarus with one hand and wedged a stone into place beneath it, hoping it would hold. It was what she had been reduced to.

_This is not sustainable,_ she said aloud.

Then, immediately, _You will have to be sustainable,_ to the stone, lest it take her words to heart. _You must do your part._

The stone sat stonily. She shook the pillar, but it did not wobble.

_Good,_ said she.

The stone stoned back, in a reassuringly stone-ish way.

Back at the House, she found Thanatos and Zagreus still awake despite her earlier assertions that they better not be when she returned. They were as of yet small enough that they could sit comfortably together on the padded purple upholstery of the same chair, while Mort sniffed in circles around their legs.

Perpetually unable to remain still, Zagreus drummed his heels against the chair legs, hard enough to spark -- Mort twitched his whiskers uneasily -- and took the end of Thanatos’s braid, winding it around his wrist.

_\-- but you ALSO said I couldn’t set Father’s cloak on fire with just my feet and I did that,_ he was saying, as Nyx brought them to the forefront of her attention.

_I said without him noticing,_ Thanatos shot back.

_Well how am I supposed to do THAT?_

A beat.

_Are you angry with me?_

_No,_ said Thanatos, angrily.

Zagreus, with the whole length of braid wrapped around his forearm like a bracer, carefully unwound it again and then wrapped it around his neck instead.

_I’m sorry I said you didn’t have one,_ he said, their heads dragged close together by necessity. _You can have mine, if you like. I don’t think he likes me very much._

_He doesn’t,_ Thanatos agreed. _But he’s our master, he doesn’t have to._

_He’s my father,_ Zagreus said, very quietly. _Does too._

The darkness around them was near-absolute, sparing only a small Ixion orb near the ceiling, which caught off the chthonic gleam in their eyes -- well, of Thanatos’s at least. Only one of Zagreus’s eyes bore the reflective lens of an Underworld creature.

Nyx manifested before them, and Thanatos startled and stood -- too fast, and since Zagreus was still attached to him by the hair, it yanked him upright too, making them both yelp. Mort vanished.

She steadied them with her hands and untangled them.

_Mother!_ said Thanatos, rubbing at his scalp. Then, squinting, _what’s wrong?_

And, as always, it was easy to pretend to be all right until someone asks you if you are, even if those someones were your very young children, and Nyx folded into the chair without entirely giving herself permission to do so. Alarmed, both boys instantly came to reassure her; hugs, to them, were as natural as breathing.

She squeezed them both back. _The House is not in order, is all. It makes for much work._

They exchanged a look.

Zagreus dragged his shoulders up straight; a familiar movement.

_Do not,_ said Nyx, fast, before he could make the offer. _You are my children. That is your work for now. Speaking of which, you are both supposed to be in bed. Even godlings need sleep._

_Oh! But! We were playing with Hypnos and then he made us take a nap and that was the whole afternoon. I think._

_Ah._ She pinched the bridge of her nose. _I see._

**Persephone.**

Her first interview with Hades, god of the dead, went like this:

Everything she knew of him, she knew from her mother, who’d told her long ago what it was to grow up as the first of the Titans’ children. How her penchant for destructive cold entertained them; they sicced her on each other with malice, hounded her endlessly, cared little that she might not desire to be used thus. Her sisters Hera and Hestia shielded her to the best of their ability. Her foster brothers plotted with her, went to war alongside her. Hera started it -- or so everyone said.

_Did not,_ sniffed the Olympian Queen, primly. _But I DID finish it._

According to her mother, the brothers had all closely resembled each other as children, but with the Titans eliminated and the earthly domains carved up between them, the needs of each changed them physically. Emotionally, too, if they could be forced to admit they had any. Her uncles Zeus and Poseidon didn’t look much like one another now, so presumably the same could be said of Hades.

Indulging her curiosity, she sought out his likeness among the mosaics and murals that decorated Olympus’s pristine pavillions. There were a few, but Demeter came upon her as she stood before one and remarked that it was very unlikely he looked like that anymore.

_Luckily,_ she added in her dry way, _you will never have to meet him._

_Mmhmm,_ agreed the goddess Persephone, innocent as a lamb.

When she asked, her Lord Uncle Zeus merely said, _He’s a crusty old stiff -- begging your pardon, kore._

Upon her arrival in the Underworld, she saw the face of Hades carved upon the gates, the columns, the furniture (her father would have commented, sotto voice, that at least he wasn’t on the toilets, but gods didn’t have those, so Persephone made the joke only in her head,) and even in the Great Hall, and so knew roughly what to expect even before he issued his summons.

When she came before him, she found him not seated on the great half-moon throne but standing in front of it, his hands folded together in a gesture she recognized well; he was trying to hide his unease. This she noticed first. Noticed second was that he was built like a stone monolith, square and wide, with eyes that gleamed like an animal’s from a distance -- not yellow like a wolf’s, or white like a barncat’s, but red as the industrious hare’s.

And the beard … well. He probably spent too much time on the beard.

_The first thing I must ask, goddess,_ said he. He did not have the chthonic accent; his voice did not hum like a beehive shook up. Persephone straightened with recognition. _Is were you coerced into this decision?_

_No,_ she answered, firm. _I was promised a crown. I want it._

_Do you have any experience in wearing one?_

She thought of her mother’s sister, Hera, who became queen upon Olympus because it was unthinkable that she could be anything else. Iris used to say (quietly) that Zeus hadn’t married her to make her queen, _she_ allowed him to be king. It could be said that -- oh, many things could be said of Hera. Most of them unfair.

_I was a farmer,_ was all she could offer. When he looked blank, she smiled and said, _putting information into grids and keeping to a strict timetable is second nature, your lordship. Administrative duties will not be beyond me._

_I see._

_You will have an adequate helpmeet in me, if nothing else._

And she meant nothing by it, but his eyes darted up and caught hers. They were black, all the way through, with that reflective red at their centers. They both looked away, embarrassed.

She wiped her sweaty palms on her skirts. Her peplos was belted too tight, as usual.

A new thought struck her.

_Were YOU coerced into this decision?_ she asked, alarmed.

His eyebrows ticked up, but then he shook his head.

_I did not want to be down here alone,_ he said, so matter-of-fact that she was already nodding before his face went suddenly, deathly still, and she realized he hadn’t meant to say it at all.

She kept her tone mild. _Yes, I understand._

_Very well._ He cleared his throat, and gestured. _Shall I show you the process?_

_Yes,_ she said, a touch more dryly. _By all means, show me how you farm the dead._

**Nyx.**

An exasperated noise vented out behind her.

_What now?_ asked ever-patient Night. Her current manifestation was smaller and thinner than an inkstroke, pressed between the pages of a closed tome on the shelf behind the desk in Hades’s personal study, detailing inventory adjustments from the past millennia. She could read a closed book faster than an open one, slipping from the shadow of one page to the next.

He scratched something out resignedly. _How long have we been in the next age now, and I still find myself signing Bronze Age to all my checks._

Nyx made a vague noise of sympathy.

Then she said, _The Olympians think I am your queen._

_Do you want to be?_

The question seemed to startle him as much as it did her, because he blinked once and put down his quill. She came out of the book and resumed her god form, filling the whole corner of the study.

_You have a queen,_ she said repressively, as the fabric of her robes swathed tightly around her. It diverted her thoughts, the realization that she hadn’t changed her look since -- yes, probably the Bronze Age. Persephone’s closet had contained what she explained to be the modern version of a peplos, a loose woolen garment pinned at her shoulders with fibulae and belted at her waist. A chiton, she’d added, pulling one out and holding it up to Nyx’s frame, was similar in construction but made of a lighter fabric -- and she found the Underworld too cold to bring them out.

You must think me old-fashioned, Nyx had said, with one assessing hand smoothing the fabric to her hip, and Persephone crinkled her eyes and told her, we’ll call it classic instead, how about that.

In that moment, Nyx missed the queen so stingingly that she lashed out.

_She lives. I can tell you exactly where. You know I have had that knowledge for centuries. You have not asked._

_You know why I have not asked._ He matched her testiness with his own, and then visibly drew a breath to calm himself. _I merely meant, do you want the authority that comes with a crown? You could negotiate with Olympus -- they would have to pay you respect._

_I desire,_ said the Night, _that your kin respect me for my own merits, not simply because they view me as an extension of you._

_A fair assessment,_ Hades allowed, because he was not stupid. _Very well then. I shall disabuse them of their fantasy at the next opportunity._

_Thank you._

_Now. Did you --_

_Page 1330, section 14, third line._

_Ah. Good._

**Persephone.**

She took a wrong turn somewhere, and instead of retreating through the back corridors to hide in her quarters as intended, she found herself in an unfamiliar guest room, thankfully unoccupied (although she couldn’t tell you if they ever _were_ occupied, she’d never seen a guest,) and then beyond that -- outside.

Well. “Outside.” It was still a cavern in Tartarus, but the ceiling soared so far out of sight it had begun to form its own atmosphere; far overhead, mist swirled in a strange, anemic approximation of clouds. The quality of the light never changed. At the bottom of the steps was a courtyard with an intricate tiled mosaic pattern at its center, ringed with a walkway whose marble was streaked with a green stone that sparkled. She thought if she bent to study it, she might find it to be fluorspar, an untouched vein of precious gemstone.

Determined not to be seen standing around looking lost -- for even out here there were shades coalescing in groups, ghostly mantled faces turned in her direction -- she straightened her shoulders and kept walking, following the marble path. It led her out of the courtyard, narrowing as it passed over a canal and then just -- ended abruptly.

She stopped. There was no railing. Just a straight plunge down the cliffside. Across from her was a frankly breathtaking view of the opposite cliff along which marched the Petitioner’s Road, the only reliable highway in all of Tartarus. (It only ran in one direction, the saying went, and that was to Hades.) From this distance, the traveling shades looked like floating weylights, bobbing along.

_Well, damn,_ she said softly, and then sat down.

The movement made her clunk alarmingly, and she flung up a hand to make sure her headpiece didn’t slip. Her wide belt pressed into her ribs, forcing her to sit upright. She felt more ornamented than a temple offering, but both Hades and Nyx had been absolutely adamant: if she was to be Queen of the Underworld, she must appear as such to all who saw her; regal and awe-inspiring and utterly without weakness to exploit. She hadn't expected to mind -- she wanted the crown -- but neither did she expect to feel like such an ungainly gosling. A hellhound would probably balance this get-up better than her. For heaven’s sake, she wore the _skull_ of something in her _hair!_

The marble rumbled faintly under her fingertips, and it took Persephone a moment to realize it came from the river Styx as it rushed through the sluiceway in the canal. She was just wondering how long she’d have to stay out here, listening to its dull roar, when the shadows warped upward suddenly and deposited Nyx onto the walkway with her.

Persephone brightened, unable to help it. 

It was becoming ridiculously easy to rely on it, the way Nyx would appear just as Persephone started feeling like she needed help, like reaching a hand out and finding something warm just as it occurred to you that you were cold. Nyx hadn’t been exaggerating when she said she saw all that happened in shadow, and so Persephone had been finding increasingly obscure places to leave her things; a figurine in pale lavender soapstone here, a gold hairpiece there, under a desk in the administrative chamber, up in the rafters. It was a delight, seeing how soon she would find these things in Nyx’s possession.

_No one thinks of such things, my Queen,_ she said, when Persephone checked with her to see if she minded, saying, _I don’t want to risk taking your omniscience for granted, Nyx._

Now, she couldn’t be more grateful for Nyx’s omniscience if she tried.

_Is she still there?_ she asked, and Nyx nodded.

She made it seem so effortless and regal, and Persephone tried to mimic the specific angle of her chin when she nodded back.

_She is not the usual messenger._

_No,_ Persephone said. _Hermes and Iris have a hierarchy of importance between themselves that they strictly adhere to, for all it usually left the rest of us baffled. But Iris has a divinity for water and light -- rainbows, specifically -- and so obviously it makes travel in the Underworld difficult._

Which is why it had been such a surprise, to hear the attendant announce the goddess Iris, lady of all colors and messenger of Olympus, here for an audience with the Underworld king, moments before Hades caught her by the hand and said, urgently, _Go. Hide. They cannot see you here._

_Rainbows?_ Nyx echoed, brows furrowed.

_Oh! When water splashes up it creates a mist, and when light hits the mist it separates into bars of color,_ she flattened out her hands to demonstrate. Someone who hadn’t visited the surface during daylight hours wouldn’t have seen it before. _We call this a rainbow. Iris can travel wherever a rainbow is cast._

In unison, they glanced back at the river Styx, then edged further into shadow.

Below, Tartarus was tinged eternally green, illuminating the statues of the medusae and the hooded shades carved into the columns. Nyx asked, _Did you come here to hide?_

_No, I got lost. I tried asking for directions, but …_ She shrugged.

She could understand shades when they spoke to her if she had her hand on them, because that highlighted to her every growth they’d ever undertaken from roots to crown and how it shaped them, but it wasn’t queenly behavior to be touching penitents all the time, so she had to bent her head and work hard to understand the whispering.

_How do you stand it?_ she heard herself say.

_My Queen?_

_I thought I couldn’t possibly feel more alien than I did when Mother first brought me to Olympus, but sometimes … oh, goodness, Nyx, don’t listen to me. It’s just Iris, reminding me how ill-adapted I am for … everywhere, it seems like._

_I am familiar with the ill-adapted, my friend, and you are not it. Nor are you alone._

Persephone darted her a smile. _No, but have you ever been lonely, Nyx?_

_I assume so, yes. But I have many children. I am always much more fond of everything when I have someone else to show it to, and that eases any feeling I have that I do not belong. Besides, I am darkness. How could I ever not belong?_ And here, she smiled wide enough to show her teeth.

When they first met, Persephone noticed that Nyx had a tendency to forget to move her mouth when she spoke, and figured it was just a disconnect between her consciousness and the peculiarities of her current physical form. Heaven knew the few remaining Titans of Persephone’s acquaintance had a similar problem, or never bothered with mouths at all. As an Olympian, she was too close to humanity; she needed her mouth to articulate a god-voice at all.

Then she’d seen Nyx smile for the first time, showing a stunning array of sharp, needle-thin teeth, like some deepsea denizen -- an Underworld creature, down to the bone and marrow.

It was only unsettling if you let it be, and Persephone much more enjoyed making Nyx smile than she was alarmed by those teeth, so her priorities fell together in the end.

_I don’t have anything of note to show anyone yet, unless you count this headgear,_ she said. _I never thought I’d miss them._

_Who?_

_The Olympians._

Nyx’s smile vanished. _I was under the impression you left them willingly._

_I did. I left them on purpose. And I’m sure ten minutes in their company would remind me exactly why I did so. But knowing I can’t talk to them for -- well, for a very long time, it’s something different._ She shook herself off, drawing her shoulders back, and gave Nyx another smile. _Thank you for your kindness, Nyx. You did not have to make me feel welcome, and you did._

She bowed, and blast her, she somehow made that look regal, even sitting on the ground with Persephone as she was. _You strengthen this House, my Queen, how could I do anything but?_

_Is there anything I can do for you? You never seem to need much, but that’s what my mother said about me, and she made being confidently incorrect her main personality trait._

Nyx lifted her eyebrows, curious, but Persephone shook her head. There was never any point trying to explain what made Demeter so awful, so -- so singularly dismissive of everything Persephone held dear, never mind that they were cut from the same cloth, the goddess of new life and the goddess of harvest. If, like everyone else on Olympus, Nyx’s response was going to be along the lines of, “oh, but she’s your mother,” or, “you know she’s been through a lot, kore, just be patient with her,” then Persephone didn’t want to know.

After a moment, Nyx ventured, almost shyly, _I like the gold. The way you wear it in your hair._

And Persephone laughed. _Gold I can gift to you with no trouble, my friend! Although, I’m curious. You’re always talking about the House like it’s sentient._

In response, Nyx waved her hand and conjured a mirror, and when she tilted it towards her, Persephone caught a glimpse of the House of Hades as it must appear from the Petitioner’s Road, looking not unlike some hulking monolithic sea creature that had beached itself upon the cliffs of Tartarus and stayed there to die.

_I am what anchors it,_ said Nyx.

_Would it ever break? What would that take?_

_Deceit. Deception. Dishonesty. Probably a few other habits along that vein. I warned Hades when he first came that he must always be scrupulous with his accounts and honest in his contracts, or the House would know._ Again, that toothy smile. _Now I think I must pass that warning on to you._

_There was deceit in getting me here, and in keeping me here,_ Persephone pointed out. _Will that be a problem?_

_I took what precautions I could, and after your arrival I watched for cracks to appear, prepared to tell you to leave. The Underworld takes priority, always, even over you, for --_

_\-- for the mortals,_ Persephone finished with her. _They need somewhere to go._

_But none did. Perhaps because no chthonic god was harmed, and the only ones being deceived are Olympus, on whom this House does not rely._

_Oh!_ said Persephone brightly. _Well, in that case, carry on._

**Nyx.**

The first time Hades’s son ran away from home, he was still a boy, freshly come into his magic.

Nyx witnessed the revelation with delight -- of course she did. Casting was good, straightforward.

It was also, frankly, underwhelming, but she could have told you it would be. Any cast that stemmed from growth magic would have been a useful thing to have on the surface, but the only thing that grew with any regularity underground was quartz. Zagreus could conjure that at will. Plentiful, worthless, bloodred quartz, in a place where gemstones spent like water.

She saw him realize this and wanted, badly, to hold him against her knees and tell him, _Growth magic was your mother’s magic. It’s a powerful magic, in the right place._

But one she could not say and the other wouldn’t matter to him, not when his older brothers were demonstrably more powerful. Not when he was the Prince.

Despite this, there was still some small, ever-hopeful part that believed his father would teach him to turn it into something worthwhile. But Hades came out to stand in the training courtyard, where Zagreus had clustered several clumps of quartz together -- Nyx thought, perhaps, he was attempting a shape, but quartz divides where and when it wants, and his attempts to coral it were only making a bigger mess -- and the way he put his hands on his hips and tapped one flame-orange foot wasn’t promising at all.

_It doesn’t look like much now!_ Zagreus tried, earnestly. _But it won’t always be so disappointing, I’ll work on it._

And the father unthinkingly said, _What a foolish thought, boy, it cannot be disappointing when I expected nothing of you at all,_ in such a way that it went right through the son like a knife into pomegranate.

The interview ended shortly thereafter.

Later, in his room, Zagreus painstakingly took everything gold he owned and put it in a box, and took the box down to the docks and presented it to the boatman Charon.

_Payment,_ said he, for all the world like it wasn’t meant to be a bribe.

And, _no, I don’t care where you take me,_ to Charon’s questioning tone. A child’s gold all put together was worth ten obals, at most. The varnish on Charon’s fingernails cost more than that. _I’m going to live away from here, I’ve decided. By myself. Alone. Okay?_

His voice wobbled dangerously. He cleared his throat, trying to firm it up. _Wherever you think is best, Charon. You know the realm better than I._

Charon regarded him a moment more. Then he accepted the box and let him into the boat, where he promptly sat himself down at the prow and determinedly arranged himself. They pushed away from the dock, making the bell attached to the boat peal once. Zagreus tensed, but nobody emerged from the shadows of the House.

It took many hours for the adrenaline to fade and the exhaustion to set in, and all the while her son the boatman paddled up this way and down that way without ever really going anywhere at all. When the boat finally returned, Nyx was waiting for it at the end of the dock where the ancient wooden posts dipped into the water, sinking like old men. Her son vocalized a greeting to her, but quietly. Zagreus was asleep against his knees, Charon’s own hat shading his face.

After bundling the child into her arms, she took Charon by the elbow and kissed his cheek.

_You are the best of us sometimes,_ she told him, and he warbled back at her, gentle.

But it was the eternal guardsman, Achilles -- a shade Nyx had not given much attention to beyond what was necessary -- who came up with the idea of the tattoos. Arrows on Zagreus’s hands, anchored with a metal bracer, that would control the way the bloodstones formed and twist them into a usable shape. He’d met (fought) a sorceress once who used a similar technique.

_That’s not any help,_ remarked the Master of the House, ever acerbic, _if he does not know how to fight._

_That’s one thing I know how to do very well, O Death, let me at least try,_ said Achilles.

And, before Nyx could do anything to nudge it, it was arranged: Achilles would teach the Underworld Prince to fight.

_Better you than him,_ Zagreus said firmly. _I’d rather learn from the greatest hero of the Trojan War than someone whose only experience with battle was tricking his family into dying._

(For that was one thing that did not survive the trip up and down the Styx. Some children learn younger than others that parents are just slightly larger versions of children themselves, prickly and selfish and unwilling to admit to their own shortcomings even when it’s detrimental to those around them. The only thing those types of parents have going for them is that they are tall enough to see over the counter, which for some reason puts them in charge.)

He developed other magics later, of course: the ability to take a shade’s arm and see how their blood stopped, to know them by their kin. But the disappointment had set in by then, and so he was unable to recognize them as talents of his blood so much as proof of how little he measured up to it.

**Persephone.**

A few days later, she asked Hades if Iris had mentioned her disappearance.

_She did,_ said he, disgruntledly. _But only as a third bullet point in a list, coming right after a new memorandum about chariot parking on Olympus -- I suppose as a way to keep up the polite fiction that someday I’ll be allowed to return._

There was a beat there, where she thought they might both be thinking that what applied to him in exile now also applied to her.

_Well,_ she decided, brightly. _At least that suggests they don’t think you had anything to do with it, yet._

_A tentative hope that lasts only as long as my brother Zeus can refrain from bragging about it._

Giving up, she pulled her hair down and started twisting it back up again. The pins had been digging into her scalp something fierce, and she sighed with relief as the pressure eased. _Oh, I don’t think he will. Kidnapping a young woman -- of his own family, even! -- to give to his crusty older brother as a bride? No, that doesn’t fit into the narrative of himself he wants to create._

He didn’t remark on the “crusty” comment, so it must not be new to him. His eyes tracked the flip of her hair as she wrapped it around itself, then slid her circlet in place to help hold it -- a placeholder only, he’d told her, until a proper crown could be commissioned. He’d said it like an apology, like it wasn’t the fanciest thing she yet owned. This one, at least, didn’t have a skull.

_So,_ he said, belatedly, and only when she was done. _He would say nothing, but if Olympus were to discover you here, they would assume I abducted you -- never mind that I have never exhibited that kind of behavior before --_

_\-- and would have no choice but to invade and mount a rescue, as a matter of principle._

_I would expect nothing less. If it was you._

She threw him an exasperated look, and he squared his jaw back at her stubbornly. _I beg your pardon,_ said she, _but even in this as-of-yet hypothetical none of you are giving me any credit in the least._

_I am just saying --_

Here, the clerk in charge of drafting their marriage contract valiantly tried to interject.

_It would be best,_ they said, loudly, _if you were more established as queen before we bring Olympus into this._

She gestured at them. He gestured back. The clerk looked pained.

And so, several days later, Persephone, goddess of verdure, and Hades, god of the dead, were married quietly, without pomp, in the Great Hall of the House, cleared of all its shades for this purpose. Nyx stood for Persephone as witness, being her closest friend there, and she expected any one of the aides or staff to stand for Hades. Instead, he called upon a demi-Titan named Mnemosyne, who hummed to herself distractingly the whole time. The clerk took both their signatures down in stone, and that was the ceremony done.

_You are Queen,_ said Hades to her, and took her hand in his. He kissed her knuckles and said, _In my name, and by the power witnessed here, you are Queen,_ and the Underworld shuddered in recognition, limning them all in light.

Afterward, they dispersed, and as Persephone descended the dais an arm took firm possession of her elbow.

She turned, expecting Nyx and already smiling, and found herself face-to-face with Mnemosyne.

She’d stooped to Persephone’s height -- even demi-Titans tended to be on the astoundingly tall side, though don’t tell Hermes that -- and Persephone could feel how solidly built she was pressed side-by-side as they were. She had a quill behind one ear and a penknife behind the other, and the front pockets of her robes, hastily sewn on and different colors from the rest of the fabric, were overflowing with bits of parchment.

_How wonderful to meet you, Per-se-pho-ne!_ she said in enthusiastic singsong. _I NEVER get to attend weddings, I shall remember this one forever. Well, I shall remember it anyway, ‘tis what I do._

_It wasn’t much …_ Persephone started, a little overwhelmed by all that force.

_Maybe so! But it is one I got to participate in, and that makes all the difference, do you not agree?_ She trilled a scale off of something else -- later, Nyx would tell her that because Mnemosyne never forgot anything, she remembered every song she’d ever heard, and there was no place for all that music to go except out her mouth -- and then she peered at her uncomfortably close and said, _So, do you like our stern and foreboding king?_

As this was something she’d carefully asked herself, she had an answer ready. _I like him well enough. It helps that we WANT to like each other, and so we keep finding things to like._

And it was true. Hades accepted her help when it came, and never demanded it when it didn’t. When they finished their work day, they departed the Great Hall together, arm-in-arm, and when they reached the corridor where it split, he departed to his quarters and she went to her chaise in Nyx’s room, and no one suggested she do otherwise. She couldn’t tell you what it was he appreciated in her -- he’d never told her -- but he smiled when he saw her and she had to trust that it was honest.

_It is,_ Mnemosyne hummed, even though she hadn’t said it out loud. She was perceptive like Nyx, in that regard. _I was one of the first chthonic beings he ever met, I know these things. And besides, the House of Hades cannot stand if it is built on lies._

**Nyx.**

The first of Nyx’s children were the Fates, three girls born from starfall and grown beneath the shelter of her cloak. This hid them from the Primordial Chaos, who would consider her preoccupation with them a threat to themself. The cloak let no light in, so like many of the Underworld’s first denizens, they never bothered with eyes. What they Saw, you needed no eyes for.

As they developed personalities, they became known as the Spinner, the Cutter, the Drawer of Lots, and only once they began their work could lives be begun, and completed.

Even Nyx herself had a thread, she supposed -- and only they would know where it ended.

After them came Ixion, whose churning fins made the stars move in constellations across the sky. He swam the rivers of the netherrealms, luring prey by stringing his false lights in front of them. Nyx collected these fallen lights the way one picks up toys after a toddler, and put them in jars to light the Underworld.

At the dawn of the next age, the Earth and Ocean had the first of their children -- a concept Nyx found fascinating. _Combining_ the qualities of two different entities? How clever!

She watched the formation of the Titans with great curiosity, and after determining what qualities they lacked most, tried it herself, out of a desire to strengthen the cohesive whole. This was her daughter Mnemosyne, called Memory.

The Titans did not appreciate it.

_HOW ENDLESSLY AMUSING,_ said her Progenitor to her. They had wasted no time in expressing their preference for the Earth and its children over time with her, and so it was no hardship, to take Mnemosyne and retreat to the Underworld.

There she had several daughters, to better keep her company: Nemesis and Aidos, called Righteousness and Conscience at first; gargantuan bronze Talos and round silver Selene; terrible Eris in the shape of a carrion eater, feathered and screaming.

None of them spoke to her much anymore, no more than she spoke to Chaos.

**Persephone.**

_It occurs to me, my Queen,_ said the Lord Hades to her in a sort of sideways way. _That I never gave you a wedding present._

_Oh, gods, is it a dead thing? Are you giving me a dead thing?_

A pause.

_It perplexes me why that would be the first conclusion you jump to._

_No, I’m sure it’s fine,_ Persephone hopped to her feet, gamely trying to cover for what had admittedly been a pretty tactless response. It wasn’t the wretches’ fault they were hideous; most organic things were, at some point or another.

He led her into the east wing of the House, which remained mostly unused. One of the rooms was a rather grand space Persephone thought might do nicely for some kind of reception hall -- once, in a particularly dipsomaniacal state, Dionysus monologued to her about the best and worst places he’d ever seen a party thrown, and while perhaps he did not have a divinity for interior design, Persephone absorbed more from that experience than she thought she would, and had some ideas for what she could do with the space. Close by was the place Nyx stood sometimes -- a process that she called the anchoring but to Persephone just looked like sleeping while standing up. The rest of the hall was gated off. Hades strode past all of those padlocks until he reached the very end of the hall.

Like the rest, the gates here were tall, imposing adamantine. Persephone flicked a glance towards the spiked tops -- and, suddenly, could smell what was beyond them.

_Is that -- ?_ she started, even before Hades had opened them to her.

Whatever his reply was, she didn’t hear it, for her nose overwhelmed her head; right ahead of her was black, loamy earth, freshly tilled, and she didn’t even hesitate -- she walked straight forward and laid down in it.

Some time later, she came back to herself. Sitting up took effort.

A simple stone path ran through the heart of what was clearly a nascent garden, and it was on this that Hades sat with his legs crossed like a child, patiently watching her.

_My Queen, I must apologize to you,_ said he, when she met his eye. _For clearly you needed this sooner._

_Oh, don’t,_ Persephone said, attempting to brush the soil from the front of her robes. Realizing it was futile, she gathered them up and, without a shred of queenly dignity, scooted over to join him. _I didn’t know it was what I needed, either._

She drew in another deep breath. The scent lodged in her lungs, the same way ambrosia did.

_The space is yours to utilize however you wish,_ he said, and when she glanced in his direction, added hastily, _though of course any change you desire to make to the Underworld would also be considered -- you are Queen,_ and the House shuddered plain acknowledgement of the fact. _But I believed -- I thought -- you might like a space that is just yours._

_I didn’t think much of anything would grow down here,_ said Persephone -- had, indeed, thought Zeus a little shortsighted, sending the goddess of verdure to a place with no sun or seasons. But she wanted power and he wanted not to feel guilty, so they struck an accord and now everyone had to live with it. She would make it or she wouldn’t.

_Nor did I,_ said Hades, _but I admit I am no expert. If anyone could, though, who if not you?_

He nodded. She followed his line of sight, and brightened immediately.

Placed directly under one of the Ixion lights, a spread of spiderwort had already begun its creeping work upon the path, coming up thick and dark underneath patches of grey, ashy flowers.

_I’m not even sure what those are called._

_Asphodel,_ said Persephone immediately. _It dries up and blows away if exposed to sunlight. I’d seen it in caves before, so it would make sense that it grows down here too -- although I suppose you don’t call it the Fields of Asphodel for nothing,_ but she trailed off, because she’d just spotted the saplings, lilting precariously.

She pushed herself to her feet, drawing near to inspect the shape of the leaves. _Poor things! These need to be staked! Are they -- goodness, are these pomegranates?_

_So I am told._

She touched her fingertips to the bark and instantly felt the rush; water and light, roots to crown and back again. It called to an answering response in her own body; water and light, Underworld to Olympus and back again through her mortal surface blood.

_My father once told me,_ said she, _that a pomegranate is a promise. It grows in conditions where little else does. As long as the pomegranates are fine, he said, so too will you be._

**Nyx.**

She supposed, if pressed, she could admit she liked the _idea_ of being courted.

And a lover? That could be amiable.

But she never bothered with one in order to bring her children forth -- at first, because there at the beginning of the world there were few partners to be had, and later because she was Night and her consciousness was always divided and would never not be, which seemed an unfair thing to inflict upon a lover.

So Nyx decided courtship wasn’t for her and got on with things.

She never felt the _lack_ of it. Having a lover was a luxury, and not everyone could have _every_ luxury in creation, or it wouldn’t be much of a luxury, now would it?

In that aeon, the Titan Prometheus was caught giving fire to the clay men -- not only gifting them with warmth and the ability to boil their water and cook their food, but also gifting them with the world’s first act of compassion. It moved Nyx, for she hadn’t given much thought to the comfort of the clay men before they became scenery in the Underworld.

Promethean fire would be too bright for the realms below, but Nyx wondered if it was possible to try something similar with the Ixion lights.

She took wax from the hives of Silence and made candles to place in all the divisions of the Underworld (there was no House yet, not in the way one thinks of a house, for she would only build that when the Olympian arrived,) but the Ixion lights did not contain enough warmth to light the wick. She wound up taking a spark from the hearth of the clay men anyway, but that was _too_ hot, and the wax melted clean off her first attempts.

Still, as anyone engaged in the act of creation could tell you, the effort was all-absorbing, and so caught up in the rush of it was she that she took a wick and let the melting wax run down its whole length. It gathered and hardened on top of itself, until finally she had a shape she could carry in her arms. Then she leaned down and kissed life into it.

This became the infant she named Charon, who contained the spark of Promethean fire and smoked whenever he spoke.

In him Nyx saw most the influence of her parent Chaos, for what other contrary purpose but chaos would lead her son the flame to become a boatman? Submerge him, she was certain, and he would die, but this did not stop him. She heard the tolling bell of his boat at his stops along all parts of the river, mortal and immortal, and he kept his hat pulled low so in the shadow of it she was always with him.

**Persephone.**

Redesigning the courts of Erebus had been on Hades and Nyx’s to-do list for nearly as long as the to-do list had existed. As they were, the courts could be called … well, utilitarian, at best. This had been fine in the beginning, as they served the practical purpose of sorting the dead, but as all the other divisions of the Underworld grew in wealth and splendor, Erebus started looking shabby in comparison.

_And goodness knows how we feel about appearances,_ Persephone remarked dryly, but when the project fell to her, she shouldered it.

She approved the Contractor’s gemstone requisition and denied Daedalus’s suggestion of trapdoors under the defendant’s stand (he pouted,) and within the century it was done.

She brought her husband the king to see it as they laid the final brick, and they stood arm-in-arm in the middle of the great marble atrium as the dazed, undesignated shades mingled about. She credited the builders and watched his profile as he surveyed their handiwork.

_My Queen,_ said he, finally. _I am so very glad you decided to smuggle yourself here._

She scoffed at that, but gently.

_It occurs to me that they would probably want me to ask,_ she ventured after a beat. _Are you jealous of your brothers who have the heavens and the seas?_

_Why should I be?_ said Hades.

_They attribute more wealth and beauty to their realms. They see the Underworld as … gloomy. I suppose in the backs of their minds they expect you to resent them._

He snorted. _What need have we for their sun-soaked fields and bloody battle ruins when we have all this?_

_Well, as the goddess of sun-soaked fields, I might have a thought or two._

He quirked his mouth at her, and then said, with sudden fierceness, _Let Olympus have it. Let them have it all. Let them be proud. The eternal truth of the surface,_ and here he gestured all around them. _Is that all its wealth will be ours, in time. We need only wait long enough, you and I._

He drew the back of her hand to his mouth and kissed it, and Persephone the Queen smiled back at him with her whole face and understood -- was beginning to understand -- how Nyx so readily called her radiant. She felt like she was blazing, like she was wearing her own triumph like a crown, so bright that her husband’s nocturnal animal eyes sparked back at her.

That night -- or whenever -- at the end of the corridor where they usually split, instead of dropping his arm she turned with him, so it left her facing the direction his quarters were in, and tilted her head.

His eyebrows ticked up, an expression both surprise and question.

_Where are you going?_ His voice was low.

_Am I Queen?_ she returned.

_You are,_ said he, and she felt a shudder, but could not tell if it was the Underworld or him.

She drew him a step closer. _And I am your wife._

And after that, the queen Persephone did not again returned to her room with the rich purple drapery. With time, the contents of her bureau moved quietly into Hades’s closets -- not by Charon, who had stepped out onto the river to run an errand and hadn’t been seen in years, but by some other shade -- and when she closed their doors in satisfaction and turned, Nyx was there.

Persephone laughed with delight, and took her by the hands to swing her around.

Nyx lifted her eyebrows, tolerating this, and remarked in her beehive accent, _You are being particularly radiant, my Queen,_ and Persephone laughed again and swept her up into a hug.

It was a good hug -- and that was something she hadn’t even _known_ had a sliding scale before coming here: Artemis dodged any attempt at affection; she would have rather embraced a gorgon than Apollo; Iris always had somewhere better to be. No one had ever really hugged their older relatives in their formative years, so it never occurred to them that she might want it. But Nyx -- Nyx held her close, like it was unfathomable to be stingy with her affection.

_Oh, Nyx,_ she said, drawing back and grasping her hands. _Have you ever heard the kind of music that transfixed you?_

_No, wait,_ she corrected herself. _That’s not the right word, because it’s the opposite of transfixing. Transfixing takes you and nails you into place. This is moving. On Olympus, Artemis had a brother -- her twin, pompous ass, possessed absolutely no qualities to recommend him -- but when he played, you were laughing without knowing why, you were weeping without being aware of it. I swear that music filled me so much my own heart left my chest to stand beside me, for there was nowhere else for it to go. Do you understand me?_

_Yes,_ said Nyx simply, watching her.

_That’s what I feel like now. Like an orchestra. Like -- this happiness will walk alongside me forever._

_I am glad the king satisfies you so, my Queen,_ said Nyx.

Persephone blinked, and shot her a look, just in time to see that purple mouth smirk. She threw her head back and laughed so loud it hurt her throat on the way out, and Nyx’s smirk widened, showing a peek of sharp thin teeth.

_By the blind and creek, I MEANT being queen, you overgrown garden rake!_ She gave her a playful nudge. _What about you?_

And Nyx, then, did something wholly unexpected -- she reached out to touch the fibulae pins at Persephone’s shoulder. Her fingertips brushed against the skin exposed by the bee-sized gaps in the fabric. Then they moved, catching her chin and lifting it, drawing Persephone up into a regal pose, ever the Queen.

_I am not one for lovers,_ she said, so belatedly that Persephone startled; she’d forgotten she asked a question. _I am the Night. I see all._

_Right._ She swallowed, wavered, and then stepped back. Nyx’s hand drifted down to her side again.

They were silent for a moment longer, and then Persephone cocked a hip and grinned, immediately less regal. _Well, if you get tired of the show, let me know._

And it worked: Nyx laughed.

**Nyx.**

The first time the goddess Nyx met Hades, he was not yet the god of the dead, but merely a young deity with a divinity for geology and riches, and an interloper in her realm.

She manifested herself a form made entirely of teeth and stomach and went to meet him, settling in to wait for an opportunity for ambush. When he passed beneath her, she uncoiled into the shadow he left behind and descended upon him in a rush.

He ducked away from her snapping jaws, falling into a defensive stance, tri-pointed spear held at the ready. As she steadied herself to strike again, he called to her, _Have you reason?_

And Nyx paused.

_I am sentient, if that’s what you mean,_ said she, coiling her stomachs underneath her and perching upon them. _And you, o flame-footed child, are stomping about my realm. Why do you trespass here?_

Slowly, he straightened. 

_I did not think there was anyone here,_ he said, blank, and swiftly held up a hand to forestall her as she swelled with rage, an inhale hissing audibly through her hundred rows of teeth. _Clearly, I am wrong. We need not be at cross purposes. I do not know you, goddess._

Ever since they ridiculed her young daughter, Nyx never bothered to revise her low opinion of the immortals who ruled the surface -- having only met the Titans -- but they must not all have been idiots, if this one could look at her monstrous form and recognize her as one like him.

_I am Nyx, Night incarnate. I created the Underworld and all the netherrealms._

_And I am Hades, a general in the Olympian army._

He and his siblings were, he told her, one-by-one trapping and dismembering their Titan parents, as they were chewing up the earth and sky between them and it had become tolerable no more. However, any immortal would reform given enough time, and he had been tasked to find a place where their pieces could be scattered so far and so wide they would never find each other again.

_And you come to the Underworld to dispose of your detritus? I must live here when you are gone. Why relegate your trash to me?_

_In my ignorance, I assumed this would be an adequate place. Forgive my intrusion, O Night, it was not my intention._

And, to her very great surprise, he stood the trident up straight and bowed to her. 

She retracted her teeth.

_Wait,_ said she, and the sigil that had begun to form at his feet flickered and faded. _You are not incorrect. My domain is thrice the size of yours. You would have better luck hiding them here than up there._ She lowered her monstrous head to regard him closely. _What would you give me, general, to use my home thus?_

Curiosity lit his eyes, colored like carnelian. _What do you need?_

He returned three times to the Underworld, the Olympian did, and she summoned her daughter to assist him in his grisly task. Mnemosyne would never forget where each component had been entombed. She was the _only_ one who knew where they all were, as even his iron stomach failed in the end.

The fourth time he descended from the surface, he carried not the bloody carcasses of his kin but a cape and helm, and a writ emblazoned in heavenly gold -- by that alone, she knew the war was over.

Wryly, the Olympian greeted her and said, _Between my brothers and I, we have distributed charge of the heavens, the seas, and the earth as forfeited by our progenitors. I have come to claim the Underworld._

Nyx, who by then had fashioned herself a god-form in rough imitation of his own, folded her hands and sighed.

He sighed back. _Yes, I know. I did try to stop them. As is, I am glad it was me and not one of them._

_When you arrive to claim a land you received as spoil,_ said she, _what do you do when you find it already occupied?_

_I would probably ask you for a job._

Her eyebrows ticked up.

_And I would make the observation that your realm may be thrice the size of any other, but only because you persist in adding to it every time its denizens complain of crowding. There is no order. No structure. Just space._

_They are the shades of the dead._

_And they will be here for eternity,_ said the Olympian patiently. _We have a responsibility to them._

She bristled at the implication that she _hadn’t_ been acting in a responsible manner, but even as she did she knew it wasn’t true. She’d been doing her best for the dead, and now the Olympian was here to add his best to hers. Their best, together, would look different than just her best was by itself.

She tilted her head. _I am listening._

**Persephone.**

As the great deeds of the mortal realm grew in frequency, so too did its capacity for evil.

After determining the matter of Heracles, her husband the king set down his quill and put his knuckles to his temples, kneading them. She saw this and came to perch beside him on the arm of his throne, and frowned.

_We cannot keep doing this,_ she said to him, for the matter of Heracles had not been dealt with so much as it had been indefinitely postponed. He had been bidden to take a number and await further tribunal, except the number he drew was a false one, so high the next age of man would have come and gone before it was called.

It was a delaying tactic only, and they knew it. 

But there was no one else to make the judgment. And anyone would tell you it would be unfair to judge a man for the crimes he committed under a madness cast upon him by your own aunt -- or in Hades’s case, by his sister-in-law. But neither would it be fair to absolve him, to only focus on his feats of strength, for he had the gods to thank for his greatness same as any other man of talent, so why should Hera’s gift of madness suddenly be her fault and not his? His wife, his _children,_ they deserved better than to be written off like that.

_What do you suggest?_ Hades asked of her. _I will tell you now, I am no great proponent of endless torture._

_And I still maintain Tantalus had it coming,_ Persephone answered. _Besides, you wouldn’t have suggested a guard dog at the gates if you didn’t want mortals to fear you._

_Hrmph. He is no guard dog yet._

_He’s a PUPPY, he’s still figuring out where his body is in space. You were that young once, I am sure._

His eyes crinkled at her, just so. _For all that dog was your gift to me, I think he is more YOURS than anyone else’s._

_Nonsense,_ fibbed a pleased Persephone. _And I’m not saying it’s not a bad idea. The fear of what will meet them after death is all that keeps half the mortals honest._

_May I?_ said a voice, and Hades and Persephone both jumped.

Nyx stepped up on her other side. Whether she had just manifested, or if she had been there the whole time, Persephone was embarrassed to say she didn’t know. She had become accustomed to Nyx knowing everything that happened in her realm.

_I have the Erinyes,_ suggested she. _And they desire a purpose._

**Nyx.**

A Fury is not born. She is made.

There were many, most of them women, but the most powerful among these were the Erinyes, three Underworld denizens cast down from their realms who became sisters when exposed to the same lingering strand of Titan blood, that which found the unsated hunger in their hearts and shuddered with purpose.

Megaera and Tisiphone had been mortals once. Nyx’s daughter Alecto had been perhaps the most impulsive and generous of the three Fates, until a shade came to her in secret, humbly bowing his head and looking to trick her and her sisters into giving him a different life, a different fate, when he had already squandered all there was to be made of his. This error, anathema to everything the Fates stood for, undid her. Lachesis and Atropos took her Sight from her and threw her blind into Tartarus. Such was her anger, her helpless rage, that Nyx could not reach her, for there comes a time when anger at yourself turns so far inward it becomes a pit from which no one else can rescue you, not even your mother. Becoming a Fury transformed her -- transformed them all, physically and mentally -- but it changed Alecto most of all.

**Megaera.**

The pain of the story isn’t worth lingering on. It is the same as women’s pain everywhere, and everyone knows you can only focus so much on a woman’s pain before it becomes clear you care only for the spectacle.

The bones of it are this:

She lived in the upper level of her father’s house and, because he was king of Thebes and she the first of his daughters, he gave her to the hero Heracles in a grandiose show of gratitude for whatever it had been. Slaying. Lifting. Wrestling. Whatever. Heracles had only a few tricks, but he was very good at them. The negotiations and the wedding were performed without her. She came into Heracles’s household already a wife.

Because he was a hero -- arguably, the first of the type -- they were entirely nomadic, packing up and moving with him wherever the gods sent him. She was always a gracious guest in the provincial megarons of others, never a host of her own. As she rarely had reason to leave her father’s house as a young girl, she felt from the beginning as if shoved onto her back foot, out of her depth. Too much to learn, not enough time to learn it in, and when she first felt a child move within her, experienced only irritation at the delay and the loss of authority it would cost her.

She’d heard of mothers so moved by emotion at the first sight of their child’s face that it altered them -- that this was generally referred to as “love” mattered little, as Megaera saw only a potential loss of self -- and so strived to harden herself against it.

And indeed, when the time came and she delivered herself a girl, she set it to nurse and briskly bound it in place with a broadcloth. Then she pulled up her hair and went back to work.

But -- 

And she could not tell you what it was, specifically, that sparked the idea, because this was the trick memory played. When she looked back later, it seemed as if her life did not truly start -- 

\-- not when her daughter was born, but some time later, perhaps while she was listening to Heracles discuss with his companions what would become of her when she was grown, oblivious that she or Megaera might desire a say --

\-- that it struck her like a ringing blow across the head, that the only person in the whole world not poised to fail her daughter --

\-- was her.

It was obvious to her even in the moment. She felt it grind to life inside of her, this change of direction, this whole altering of self, where Megaera, formerly of Thebes and now of Heracles, realized she was mother to a _daughter_ and vowed that every decision that had been acted upon her without her permission would not happen to her child.

To be forced to play helpless spectator to her own life --

Never again.

She would not be helpless.

Her daughter would _not_ be helpless.

Deianara, she was named, and because she was the first to turn and try to run when the madness came upon him, Heracles slew her first.

**Nyx.**

Young children do not make shades when they enter the Underworld.

They hadn’t lived a long enough life to cast one yet. Small candles do not make lasting flames -- a good thing, too, she said to Hades when he first arrived to claim her land and had to brought up to speed on its upkeep, or else the Underworld would be overrun with infants dead within their first few days of life, outnumbering potential caretakers two to one.

But there was a cruelty to it, too. Nyx could acknowledge that.

She wished, as she had so often wished before, that there was some comfort she could offer Megaera. Some promise that her murdered children -- numbered three, a girl and two boys, whom Megaera died trying to protect -- were at peace in some other realm, somewhere beyond even Erebus, and that she would see them again someday. That perhaps the Fates had taken their potential and woven them anew into some new life.

But she simply did not know.

So she could not stop that deep, awful, swallowed-down hurt inside Megaera, the one that called to the Titan blood so plainly.

And as for Tisiphone … 

Well, the story of a hollow, black-eyed woman whose vocabulary only extended to one noun and one verb was exactly what you’d expect it to be, too.

**Persephone.**

When it began, there was no question.

She knew as soon as there was anything to know, as surely as she would know when a seedling had successfully split its shell, long before it came through the soil.

She called it as such at first, too.

_Be kind to me, seedling,_ she whispered, drawing her fingers up under her heart, where her ornamented belt drew taut. _I have not done this before. I have much to give, but I am not limitless._

She kept it to herself, waiting, because it was true of all newly-begun things that they might yet fail, but when Cerberus started sniffing at her with all three heads instead of just the usual one, others in the House began to take note.

_My Queen,_ said the guardsman with the long face, putting his fist to his heart and bowing as she came into the west hall. _Are you ill?_

She blinked. _Goodness, Achilles. Do I look it?_

_Of course not. Only, I think the chef might have a coronary if you send back any more of your plates half-eaten -- or whatever the equivalent of a coronary would be, for us,_ and he pulled the corner of his mouth at her, a near-smile.

Persephone blinked again. _But why should that distress them? The food is not wasted, surely._

For a moment, he looked as nonplussed as she felt, before his expression changed and he said, even more gently, _I don’t think the chef worries about the waste, my Queen. I think they worry for your health. We all do._

_Oh._

The queen Persephone had to go sit by herself for awhile by the balcony, adjusting to this new idea. Worrying about the health of a god had a much different meaning than worrying about the health of a mortal. Then she sent a shade to her husband the king, requesting an audience.

Since her usual habit was simply to appear beside him at his desk and make a remark on his parchmentwork that first made him blink, startled, and then laugh (as deep and rumbly and rocky as he, which Persephone quite liked, if the way her heart gave a jackrabbit kick of triumph at the sound of it was anything to go by,) this caught the full brunt of his attention. He met her in the garden.

Well. No need to be nervy about it.

_I am expecting,_ she said, and added, _a child,_ when he continued to look blank. He couldn’t actually be _surprised,_ could he?

Except he could.

_Truly? For certain? I … had forgotten that was a side effect of the … erm._

_Yes, of the erm,_ said Persephone tartly. 

He visibly fell back on what he knew. _Do you have any experience?_

She bit down the first three responses and managed a fishy swallow instead of the fourth, and tried to come at the question sideways. Between becoming a goddess on Olympus and realizing she had to leave it by hook or by crook, there hadn’t been many god-children born on the mountain. Some, but Amphitrite’s shoals were … not typical (probably?) and Aphrodite … well, was Aphrodite. Loved being with child, loved her children in that bubbling full-hearted way of hers, had no problem telling everyone it was all shameless greed (love usually was, dearest,) because she loved her husband and wanted to see the both of them in every combination. It confused their stodgy uncles, she knew, that a goddess like Aphrodite was so smitten with Hephaestus, the craftsman, and he with her, but it made perfect sense to Persephone. Love was work, children a craft.

Still. _Not with god-children,_ she sighed. _Mortals, some, but it was a long time ago._

_And you’re sure?_

She put her hand on the trunk of the closest pomegranate tree. _As sure as I am that this too is real._

He worried at his bottom lip. His fingers were absently twisting the ends of his beard into points. She recognized the look of a man who longed to be at his desk, writing something down, and sighed again. Pulling her skirts to the side, she sat down among the tree roots. They shifted for her, then nudged into her ribs, like a parent tucking a child into their side.

Hades came over and sat beside her, moving gingerly and with uncharacteristic trepidation. She eyed him.

_I …_ He reached for her hand, and she let him have it, but grudgingly. She was beginning to think she was a little disappointed in this reaction. _I do not know what to tell you. Only …_

Dread made a funny weight in her stomach. _Only what?_

_Only the Fates told me, an aeon ago, that I would never have an heir._

_Oh!_ It burst out of her, more startled exhale than laugh. Then, _oh!_ again, as she turned it over in her head. _By the blind and creek, is THAT what was worrying you?_

_Mostly we say blood and darkness here._

_I’ll swear how I damn well please,_ which was in a circuitous way, because it’s rude to swear by other gods’ names when you had to see them at the weekly pulse meeting. Presumably ‘blood and darkness’ was a way of swearing by Hades without naming him. _They said that, then? The Fates. They used the word ‘heir,’ specifically?_

_Yes,_ said Hades, grimly.

_Hades,_ said Persephone, with as much patience as she could muster. _A child is not an heir. You HAVE a child. You DECLARE an heir. One does not necessarily become the other. There could be any reason why the Fates would say you’d never declare an heir._

_I don’t think --_ But he stopped, because yes, that was exactly something the Fates would do.

She tilted her head. _What did you think they meant?_

_At first, I assumed it meant I wouldn’t marry, that I would rule the Underworld alone -- all right, yes, with Nyx’s partnership,_ he amended, at her very sharp look. _But then -- you. So I assumed it meant you’d be my Queen in name only and our marriage would never have issue. Then the, erm --_

_Here we are with the erm again._

_Well, yes. So …_ He spread his big hands, as if that was that.

_So you’ve already changed your mind about what they could mean once before,_ she said briskly. _So do it again. We’re going to have a child, you and I, but for one reason or another they won’t rule the Underworld once we’re done with it._

She could see this wasn’t convincing him -- why did he assume a proclamation from the Fates had to mean tragedy? Honestly -- and went for the throat.

_They could decide to be a farmer instead._

Hades reared back with such a look of offense that Persephone dissolved into laughter, falling back into the puffy asphodel. _Don’t give me that!_ said she, _more than half of everyone here was a farmer! Even Achilles farmed!_

He looked away from her, grumbling subvocally, and she sat up, struck with inspiration.

_Or!_ she said. _They could leave the House and establish their own kingdom in a realm not even Nyx has seen, and YOU would have to be polite on state visits._

_I am always polite,_ Hades shot back, and she lifted an eyebrow. _I am!_

She continued in this vein, drawing him into increasingly unlikely scenarios were they could have a child and still fulfill the Fates’ design, until finally he had relaxed against her, near-smiling.

_What shall we name it, then?_ he asked, and she smiled at him with her whole face.

_Zagreus,_ said she, instantly. _For my father._

_The mortal,_ Hades agreed. _It is one way to make him immortal, I suppose,_ and she flashed him another smile, loving him so profoundly in that moment that she could feel her next heartbeat all the way down to the ends of her fingers. It caught her by the throat and squeezed.

Then he said, _I notice you are not suggesting we name it Demeter, if it is a girl._

_Zagreus could be a girl’s name,_ Persephone retorted.

A beat passed.

She cut a look in his direction. His beard twitched.

They fell apart, pealing with laughter, so loud she heard a startled shade drop something in the hallway.

_Very well. I will ask Nyx for suggestions,_ she managed in between the giggling, and he took her face between his hands and kissed her devoutly.

_Do that, my Queen. She is good at naming daughters._

**Demeter.**

_Truly?_ said the Lord Hades to his son, drawn out in spite of himself. _She said nothing?_

The prince was near to levitating with fury, already primed with possible retorts, but at this, he deflated.

_... no?_ said he. _Should she have?_

_Hm. You were named after someone she knew once._

The prince blinked several times in a row, processing this -- the absence of this information and the shape it made in the portrait of himself, unknown until now -- but the Lord Hades merely bent his head and began scribbling again, unconcerned that anything he revealed be significant.

_I don’t think much makes an impression on her these days,_ Zagreus offered to that limited view. _I think she’s … I mean, I don’t know her well, but I think she’s become obsessed with her own grief. She can’t do anything about it but she does like the image it makes of her._

_Not all mothers are made to be mothers, boy,_ said Hades, god of all the deceased. _One does not always follow the other. Any mother may make a child, but no child can make a mother who is not prepared to be one._

And, quieter: _it was not her responsibility to make Demeter BE the parent she needed her to be, nor was it her fault when Demeter failed._

Zagreus blinked more, clearly lost -- Demeter only the most recent acquaintance among his relatives -- and stammered aimlessly before hitting on a different tract. Anger, at least, was always reliable, and of unlimited resource.

_And what of fathers?_ demanded he. _Can they be made to act like fathers?_

_We are not speaking of fathers, boy!_

**Nyx.**

In a stunning act of cruelty, the Lord Hades employed Megaera, First of the Furies, and tasked her to his pubescent son.

The assignment filled them both with instant loathing -- that Megaera should be reduced to little more than nanny to some hotheaded kouros, that Zagreus should understand his father believed he needed one.

_You will not interfere,_ Hades said to Nyx, when she approached him to do exactly that. _He is my son. He cannot hide behind your skirts forever._

_You gave him to me to raise and I did it, Hades. Reprimanding me now for doing the mothering that YOU asked me to do is hypocrisy._

But it was done. She could only watch as Zagreus accompanied Megaera on her rounds to all the wrongdoers of Tartarus. He met Sisyphus and the Sneak, Tantalus and the Oathbreakers of Susa -- watched and learned the merciless behavior that gave the Underworld its reputation. Keep your promises and your hands to yourself in life, Meg kept saying, and you won’t need to be punished in the afterlife. Zagreus listened to her, but only when she wasn’t looking; when she was, his kept his attention everywhere but on her. Within a month at the job, they both knew the other so well they could goad each other into a towering rage with just two words and a raised eyebrow.

He wanted her attention. She wanted him out of her way, and with that not an option, wanted him crushed down so small she need pay him no mind.

And Nyx knew what the inevitable conclusion would be, and still sighed to see it coming.

When it happened, it was -- of course -- in the middle of some childish fight, and when Zagreus straightened up and fired at her, _why don’t you make me?_ something spasmed across her face so near to hatred that his throat closed. She advanced on him.

As far as first sexual encounters went, it wasn’t the worst Nyx had ever had to witness, but it was among them -- the kind that left both parties feeling more miserable afterwards.

Meg disappeared for a time, and Zagreus wore a shawl that covered his arms and back, a habit he’d long since fallen out of. It hid everything from any eyes but Nyx’s, though Achilles inadvertently put a hand directly over one of the welts while mid-conversation, and frowned when Zagreus flinched away.

With this new occupation taking up all his time, she saw him slowly withdraw from all his usual confidants, and bully away the other ones -- _Don’t bother,_ said Thanatos sidelong to a frowning Hypnos, and with nonchalance added, _let’s find somewhere else to be, Hypnos, he’s not like us,_ and Zagreus turned his red eye on them and said, all teeth bared, _You’re right, Than, I think you’ll find I take after my father_ \-- and she knew not what to do. She desired greatly to speak to him, to stop this headlong rush, but could not see a way to do it without revealing that she had seen it all. That would only make it worse.

In the middle of this, news came from the surface that her daughter Eris had offended the Fates and only one possible solution remained, and when she came back from that, she did not collect herself in time; Zagreus saw her manifest and rose to his feet, and with one look at her face, all self-absorption fell from him immediately.

**μήτηρ,** said he. _Are you all right?_

_I am --_ fine, Nyx almost said, but that was too big a lie to get her mouth around. _In truth, child, I have been better._

He came to stand very straight at her side, though his full height at this age was not quite to her elbow. _Is there anything I can do?_

_Oh, child._ Nyx sighed again. _A hug would be nice._

He smiled -- a real smile, she’d surprised him -- and then flooded without hesitation into her arms, and in his embrace pressed all of his love and devotion and belief into her, and she bent her head over his, relieved to find these things still there. She tightened her grip on him, too, wanting to ease the sting where Megaera had gouged her frustration, then her guilt, then her anger at that guilt out of him.

The next they approached each other, it was better -- not good, because Zagreus and Megaera as they were then didn’t have the ability for that -- but with an understanding. Maybe it was awful and would end badly, but so long as they _chose_ to be awful together rather than having it be chosen for them, that made all the difference, to them.

It went through the House the way these things do, that the Fury Megaera had the Prince of the Underworld in her bed, that he was embarrassing and ridiculous for her and could be easily led. Nyx’s teeth ground in the back of her jaw, and because she was the House and it was her, its stones ground, too. Somewhere, towers fell.

_Good,_ was all Lord Hades said, when Nyx could see no reason to keep the information from him any longer. _Maybe she will teach him some of the obedience I so prize in her._

And Nyx watched him dismiss it from his mind, and, for the first time in their long partnership, hated him utterly.

**Megaera.**

Somewhere.

Somewhere it stopped being, _I will never be helpless again._

Somewhere it became, _I will not rest until they feel as helpless as I once felt._

And how do you come back from that? How do you stop?

How do you stop when it is so easy to stay exactly where you are, and say it was inevitable?

**Persephone.**

_But what is it going to LOOK like?_ asked Nyx’s earnest young son, hanging off his mother’s hand and pulling her off-kilter. _Is it going to have three heads like Cerberus?_

_I hope not!_ Persephone laughed.

He frowned, considering this. _How do you not know? Aren’t you the one making it?_

Nyx jostled him gently. _Thanatos. I could not have known what YOU were going to look like. We do not make children to LOOK like anything._

_I’m just saying,_ Thanatos insisted, stuck on this point. _It COULD have three heads._

A bark from up ahead signalled that the paragon of three-headedness in question was just around the corner, so he dropped his mother’s hand and darted towards the sound, feet scarcely touching the tiles. Another bark and a delighted yelp soon followed, accompanied almost immediately by something heavy and likely ceramic crashing to the floor.

Persephone glanced sidelong at Nyx, and silently, they both turned on their heels and started walking in the other direction.

She put a hand under her belly. She was firmly on squash territory now -- a large autumn gourd, perhaps, or a pumpkin, turning her sway-backed with the effort of carrying it. My pumpkin, she thought, and curled her toes delightedly, safe in their sandals were no one could see them, spare perhaps Nyx. It was either be excited or be terrified, and Persephone had decided long ago there needed to be a limit on things she was terrified of.

Beside her, at eye level, Hypnos turned his head against his mother’s shoulder, mussing spider-fine hairs all across his forehead. Abruptly moved by this, she picked up his small pudgy hand and kissed his palm. He didn’t stir, except to smack his mouth sleepily against the fabric beneath Nyx’s mantle. She’d heard from Hades that the boys were the same age, but where Thanatos was running, talking, teleporting -- _I do not wish to speak of it,_ Nyx sighed -- Hypnos seemed perfectly content exactly as he was.

She smiled, and then became aware Nyx was watching her.

_Something troubles you,_ she remarked, voice mild. It was her circumspect way of saying, I see all that happens in darkness but I will not bring it up to discuss with you unless you need to discuss it.

_Oh, probably._ Persephone made an equivocal gesture.

_Beyond the usual, I mean._

That was all that was said for some time, but a simple fact of godhood is that things will come to you if you wait long enough.

_It’s just. I’ve known since I was small that I wanted children of my own._

_But?_

_But now that I’m an adult, I can’t help but wonder: is it about me? Do I only want children so that I can do a better job with them than was done with me? Do I want to raise them for their sake, or do I really want a second chance at raising me?_ A pause. _What if I make the same self-absorbed mistakes, and make a child who has to unlearn me the way I had to unlearn my mother?_

They drifted to a stop as she spoke, so they were right outside the foyer that lead to the Furies’ wing. It was quiet then; all the Furies called to their work elsewhere. There were seventy-one of them currently living in the House, and Persephone warred with herself on whether she wanted more. On one hand, she knew from Olympus that it was a measure of success to be able to maintain that much staff with fair pay, but on the other, creating a Fury was in itself an act of cruelty. She studied her sandals, and thought. The pattern in the tilework was of interlocking bones -- bat bones, she noticed, instead of the human skulls in the Great Hall.

_And the worst part,_ she added, after a long pause. _Is that all of that can be true, and I still want her here. I want my mother. It’s lonely, having to do this part on your own._

_I see no weakness in that,_ Nyx offered. _I cannot bring Olympus to you, my Queen, nor take you to it, lest it ruin us all, but -- I have been a mother many times over. If it is a mother you need, I could be as one to you._

Persephone blinked, startled.

Then -- unable to help it -- she burst into laughter.

It was a long, full-body laugh, bending her double, and when she straightened, she took one look at the expression on Nyx’s face and it set her off all over again.

_Oh, Nyx, please forgive me, I do not mean to mock you!_ she managed to say when she got her breath back, and reached for her hands. _I just. I do not need you to be my mother. I am so very happy merely that you are my friend._

Then, because Nyx’s face was still doing something interesting: _Have you tried not being everyone’s mother? Have you ever just been a friend?_

_I do not know how to answer that,_ said Nyx stiffly, and, feeling something very much, Persephone drew her in close to kiss her cheek.

_Sounds like we both can learn something from one another, then._

**Nyx.**

Wherever night fell, wherever darkness crept in, wherever there was a shadow cast, there too was Nyx. She saw it all.

She knew the secrets of mortals, the shifty little actions they performed behind the turned backs of others -- the importance of which loomed large to them but remained insignificantly small in Nyx’s wide vision. A manifestation of herself stood as a permanent fixture in the halls of Erebus, as her testimony almost always weighed on the judgment of the dead.

She knew, too, the secrets of all those who lived within her House.

She knew Hades still kept a portrait of the Queen, so that her face was the first he saw upon waking.

She knew that sometimes, as he dressed, the shade Achilles wished for another pair of hands to aid him and would put a hand to his own shoulder and stand there for a time, until he had forgotten its weight and could pretend it belonged to another.

She knew the Fury Megaera, without meaning to, turned her head whenever a shade shared a name with her one-time children.

She knew her son the deeplight would swim straight up to the barrier between realms and push his spindle-toothed, eyeless face against it, wishing he could see in, wishing he knew what everyone else could see.

She knew her son the harvester wished Zagreus were not his brother.

**Persephone.**

Most of the time, when gods had children with mortals, those children were blessed beyond anything a mortal could dream but, ultimately, were only mortals themselves. Rarely did mortals bear gods.

But Persephone hadn’t been the only half-human on Olympus. Apollo and Artemis had been like her, as had Iris. The four of them sat together at parties a lot -- and no, it wasn’t as pathetic as it sounded. Usually. Some of the others were demi, too, but from the other direction: Hermes and Hebe and Amphitrite were half-god on one side, half-Titan on the other. So while the Olympians tended to lump them all together, like it was all the same, it wasn’t, and you could guess who looked down on who. Artemis at least had the hunt as an excuse to get away from it, and Iris her work, but Persephone had to grit her teeth and deal with it.

That wasn’t the point.

The point was, she had spent the first twenty-seven years of her life blessed beyond mortal reckoning but assuming, in the end, that she would meet the same fate they all did. She’d learned all the things a human learns. She thought she knew what to expect.

So when the time came -- and her internal senses told her so, politely -- she got up, neatly filed the scrolls she’d been reviewing, and retired to her quarters to deliver her baby.

A few hours later, she was revising every opinion she’d ever formed.

Never in her life had her body felt so alien. It wrenched. It cramped. It twisted on itself. Persephone truly felt as if it was trying to expel them both. A demi body trying to birth a godling.

Someone sent for the king, and for once she didn’t even care what she looked like -- he took her weight in his arms without a word, holding her up as she tried to take the pain and shove it away from her. Even godpower had its limits.

He pressed his head against her sweaty own.

_My Queen,_ said he, low and confident, speaking it true so that the Underworld shuddered and limned them in light, sharing his power with her the only way he could. _My one and only, my Queen._

And then --

_Persephone. Here._

The voice was Nyx’s -- Persephone had no idea when she’d arrived to help, although technically, with Nyx it didn’t matter, as she was always there -- and after a moment, she took her limp arms and made them into a shape. Then into them she deposited --

_A son, my Queen._

\-- and her arms closed compulsively, hugging it to her chest.

_A son?_ she breathed, and, still running entirely on instinct, pulled away to claw her shift down and press it against her bare skin, feeling a hundred times more right.

And it was. It was a boy, as grey-skinned as a cyclops with a slick halo of dark hair, and molten-colored feet that Persephone could feel against the inside of her elbow, like holding a hot kettle. She caught one in her other hand and held it, testing; it was a wonder she hadn’t been able to feel this from the inside -- but then again, he’d been a very still baby, not one for kicking.

Hades tightened an arm around her.

_Looks like we both lose,_ she offered, tipping her elbow down to show him what she’d already seen -- the eyes were half-lidded, but visibly black all the way through. _No red, no green._

_That is not uncommon with newborns,_ Nyx quietly volunteered. _He might yet inherit either._

She’d stepped back against the wall, shrinking into herself to be unobtrusive, and Persephone reached for her without thinking. Nyx responded to her wordless plea, and came forward to take her hand. 

_Thank you, Nyx,_ said she, and let her head rest on Hades’s shoulder.

_Zagreus, then?_ said he, and the baby drew in a breath and promptly coughed on it; a choked, wet noise.

Seeing his face screw up, animated, _alive,_ Persephone’s whole chest surged anew with feeling --

\-- and just as immediately went cold.

Her hand seized tight. _Nyx, something’s wrong._

**Nyx.**

_Where’s Mother?_

The godlings on the floor startled, heads jerking up in synchrony. They found Thanatos hovering over them, already scowling.

Zagreus’s eyes flickered in surprise. He’d had left them less than five minutes before, and the Thanatos levitating there now inside a fading sigil was not the same one who’d just walked out the door. But he set his jaw and said nothing. The Fates bent time for Thanatos sometimes, when there was a lot to be done. They liked him.

Hypnos didn’t have the same restraint.

His eyes opened fully. _Wooahhhh,_ he said, taking in Thanatos’s appearance, which couldn’t be called disheveled but very clearly had been lived in for some time; his scythe sagged tiredly behind him, tip catching against the stone. It would be some time yet before he grew into it. _What happened to you?_

_Hello to you too, you little goblins. Where’s Mother?_

_With Nemesis._ Zagreus reached behind his head and yanked a pillow down from the chaise, dropping it into the floor in invitation. Thanatos hesitated, and then descended to sit with them.

_I see,_ said he, because nothing needed else needed to be said.

Indeed, the whole god-form of Nyx was there now, enduring the sarcastic diatribe that was Misery her daughter, former wielder of the sword Stygius in an age where she had been called Righteousness -- and like all righteousness when it is ignored too often, corrupted until there was nothing left. Nyx could have no more stopped this slide into misery than she could have stopped Alecto’s into self-loathing and vindictiveness. Sometimes, being a mother felt like an exercise in continual helplessness.

Still, she was present wherever a shadow was cast, and so was aware as Hypnos hiked his quilt up his shoulders and said, _She wants to talk to you. Our sister, I mean. Why you, I have no idea!_

_She probably wants me to join her pyramid scheme,_ Thanatos deadpanned.

_Ohhh yeah, that sounds like misery._

_Were you gone long?_ Zagreus asked, watching them.

_Long enough. It was winter. A lot died at once. I don’t like the children. Mortals -- the adult ones at least -- can understand what’s going on, but the children don’t._ He shrugged, a prickly roll of his shoulders. _But it needs to be done, and I’ve got the sense for it._

They listened to this, and after a pause Hypnos said, _Wow, that sure sounds like a lot to put on your shoulders just because you’re the only one with the power to do it. Wish we could help._ He lifted his hands. _Oh well!_

Zagreus jabbed him hard in the ribs.

_Ow,_ he complained.

Zagreus jabbed him again, more pointedly.

_What’s that for? You keep nudging me like you’re secretly trying to tell me some -- oh,_ Hypnos finally caught on to the hint.

Thanatos had no problem intercepting it, either, but in his tiredness was a beat too late.

_Don’t -- !_ he started, setting his heels and launching airborne, but not before Hypnos’s fingertips caught the bare skin of his ankle.

They both moved at once, catching his head before it cracked the tiles and dragging the pillow over to cushion it.

_Wow,_ remarked Hypnos, as they looked down at him, unconscious. _Sure am glad I never have to watch little mortals die. Looks exhausting!_

**Persephone.**

They’d told her, both of them. Then, it had just been a fact. Families pay the fee and step together into Charon’s boat, and somewhere between the beginning of the trip and the end, the younger children simply fade away.

They do not cast a shade in the Underworld.

**Nyx.**

They do not cast a shade in the Underworld.

Not even this one.

**Persephone.**

When it became apparent there was nothing to be done, the goddess Nyx bowed to them, so deeply her own shadows nearly swallowed her whole, and took the … took the remains with her when she left.

The Lord Hades stared after her, struck mute, long after the heavy door banged shut and there was nothing more to see. The look on his face was impenetrable. 

The silence between them grew, and grew.

Then her picked up her hand and brusquely kissed the back of it. He retreated into the study adjacent, and did not emerge again.

It was exactly, _precisely_ what she would have expected him to do, if she had thought to plan for this moment -- and just because one behaves in the manner most predictable to those who know them doesn’t mean it hurt any less, to suddenly be left alone with empty arms and the coldness of a closed door.

If asked, later, what was the strongest memory Queen Persephone had of her husband the king, this was what superceded them all: those hours after her son died, and the dark, heavy door, shut to her.

She laid there for what seemed like a whole tectonic age.

It could have been, for all she knew. The Underworld made time immaterial. Unbearably so, at times.

_Get up,_ she told herself. _Get up. Fix the bedsheets. Fix your clothes. Fix your hair. You cannot keep wearing this day._

But her body wouldn’t obey. There were two Persephones at war inside of her: the one from before, who hadn’t yet caught up to the moment, who kept thinking things like -- the cot, I need to bring the cot over -- before remembering, and the Persephone of now, who couldn’t string one thought onto the next, who couldn’t conceive of a moment past this one, where the pain was a living thing taking every sense from her. Between the two of them, her heart rioted, leaping and plunging in equal awful measure, and her stomach rolled, and her arms -- her arms clenched, pressing down against her sore breasts, and clenched again, entirely without input from the rest of her, as if thinking if they just made the right shape then her child could materialize between them, whole and healthy. She was the goddess of new life, was she not? What was the point -- what was the point -- what was the point if she couldn’t --

What was the point --

What, what, what.

She watched the doors, but the others did not return to her.

**Nyx.**

She had no concept of the time it took.

Many nights, perhaps. Usually -- being Night herself -- she could keep very precise track, but that sense had left her and she had no basis with which to realign it. It could be any time. It could be all of them.

He came for her eventually, of course.

He would have made for a disappointing king if he hadn’t, the way his House had wrenched and bucked and howled with her efforts. 

He came with Gigaros in hand, eyes gleaming red in the dark. He came for her without hesitation, and this time did not ask if she had reason. Sensing the violence in him, the monstrous shape of the goddess Nyx drew her lips off her fangs.

With a hundred voice, she snarled, _COME NO CLOSER, HADES._

Hades jerked to a halt.

_Nyx?_ said he, dead-voiced. _But I … the House. What have you done to the House?_

Nyx drew breath to explain -- she needed the foundation stones, she needed the lights from the Ixion jars, she needed all the darkness that fueled the Eldest Sigil -- and lost momentum, gusting it all out again. Instead, she shifted her hindquarters and lifted a wing.

Beneath the wing were a set of arms, and nestled inside those arms like an ember within a hearth --

_HE LIVES,_ growled the many tongues of Night.

Gigaros clanged as it fell to the stones.

Within an instant, he was at her side, reaching out a hand in the most childlike instinct -- to touch, to verify for himself; the glowing coalstone feet, the pink skin, the breath coming in and out. And -- at long last, Nyx let her grip relax.

He scooped the infant up, pulling his cape around front to soften the coldness of his breastplate. His big hands were hesitant, unused to the act of cradling.

After a time, he lifted his head, eyes full of questions.

_SHE IS OUR RADIANT QUEEN,_ rumbled monstrous Nyx, as this seemed to be the most sufficiently relevant explanation. _I COULD DO NO LESS._

As she said it, she tried not to think of Megaera, of all the other mothers who could not hold their infant children in the afterlife, and stepped fast to avoid the guilt, that only now had she felt moved to intervene -- and what she had begged the House to give to make it happen.

With Zagreus tucked into his elbow, the god Hades reached out and laid a hand on her muzzle.

He said, _my friend,_ and it shocked them both. 

_My friend, the debt I owe you for this is unpayable._

_BUT?_ pressed she who was darkness, alert to the shape the words didn’t make.

_But she is gone._

**Persephone.**

The boat rocked. She kept her head down, her hands clenched white-knuckled in her lap, but even as they eased out into the current, no cry came. Hades had not come to see her. Nyx had not come to see her. She had been reduced to leaving a note. 

Charon hesitated, then lifted his hat from his head and gently settled it on top of her own. Gratefully, she grabbed its wide brim and pulled it low, blocking everything from sight.

*


	2. The Heir

*

**Nyx.**

The thing was, she had seen Zagreus talking to Hypnos.

She had _seen_ it.

They’d been sitting by the pool, her son the dreamer and the Prince, pants rolled up to their calves and legs swirling through the blood-wine, and Hypnos was in the middle of saying, all spluttering indignation: _of course I can do that! Please, that’s nothing!_

Zagreus, in return, showed teeth.

At the time, Nyx had been too delighted to see them spending time together again to recognize the expression for what it was, but it came to her in a rush several nights later, when she realized that the House had grown too still. She flooded the full force of her presence into the Great Hall, towering tile to vaulted ceiling, but she was too late. Everyone in the House was under a spell of deep sleep -- all except Zagreus, standing at his father’s desk with parchment in hand.

She need not see what it was: it had lived in darkness for so long she knew it intimately -- the places where the ink smudged because the Queen had been in too much of a hurry to blot properly, the uncharacteristically shaky handwriting. She had been exhausted, in pain, and Nyx had not seen her decision until it was already made.

She must have made some kind of noise, because Zagreus’s head jerked up.

He whirled, red eye finding her first and green eye following, and in the span of a single heartbeat his face did a dozen terrible things.

_You -- you --_

He stopped. Swallowed. Made another attempt.

_You’re not. She left. The Queen. She left her husband and -- and her infant son. That’s. That’s me. I’m the Queen’s son._

And.

_Not yours._

And there it was.

It was only a statement. It was not meant to be cruel. She knew this. Despite all the examples shown to him, Zagreus’s first instinct was never cruelty. She _knew_ that.

But hearing it said was as sudden as the Cutter’s clip. 

It felt like getting impaled. 

It went all the way through her, this unmaking, this unmothering. That somewhere along the way, even she had begun to believe it, this lie that had to be built to be believed -- after all, Persephone had been right. She was Mother Night. When hadn’t she tried to mother someone? 

She made it her truth, and here it was, undone.

Her head bowed under the weight of it.

 _You are right,_ confessed the goddess Nyx, and his eyes went wide.

**Persephone.**

The first year, above, all that would grow in the garden of the goddess Persephone was nettles. She made its bread and drank its tea, and, with time, found the taste of her own heart too bitter to endure.

Eventually, when she sowed a seed, it remained itself. Her real work began.

There were questions she couldn’t answer. What was she now? She, the gardener in seclusion -- was she still a goddess? (Could you be a goddess if no other gods knew to acknowledge you?) Was she still Queen of the Underworld? (Could you still be queen when you performed none of the duties?) Was she still a mother? (Could you be a mother when you had no child to hold?)

Sometimes, it buried her.

But these times became distinct because they ceased to be the only kind of time she had, and having times where she felt almost okay made the times she _wasn’t_ okay all the more noticeable, and unbearable. Having the distinction gave her a direction to move in, even if that direction wasn’t any clearer than just -- _away._

She built herself a shelter -- merely blankets thrown up to make an awning, at first, and a broom of bundled rushes to sweep her dirt floors clean and bare -- and found sapling orange trees on the sunny side of her slope, which needed little encouragement from her. When she felt the sink coming -- when she started feeling as heavy and cold and grey as the ironed-on sky -- she would go to them and force them to flower, and then to fruit. They strained against her, hating it, to be unnaturally forced to do both at once, when rightfully flowers and fruit should be on the opposite ends of a growing season. The guilt acted like the prick of a needle, shocking her straight before she could slip entirely into her melancholy and suffocate again.

You cannot survive on cruelty and salt, and so Persephone, step by aching step, made herself better. If not for her own sake, because she could admit some things were beyond her, then for the sake of the trees.

It was a start.

**Nyx.**

On the road outside the poleis -- the name the Greeks gave their city-states -- two travelers met.

At first, there was only one. It was a fine night, the air cool and still with thin skudding clouds that barely obscured the stars, and the city workmen led their oxen out through the gates. They trundled down a broad avenue lit well with lanterns, pulling carts heaped with the refuse of restaurants and public houses because this was the hour designated to them. Within the next hour or so the traffic would change direction, as the heavy carts of produce and wines came in from the outer sprawl. You could almost believe the war hadn’t touched this place yet, but that was fiction -- there wasn’t a single house in which it did not live. A woman walked along with them, himation pulled up and mantled around her face -- it did an almost preternaturally good job at deflecting attention. Soon, the oxen train pulled away, and she kept walking.

Up ahead, an owl hooted warning, and between one breath and the next, a second woman materialized before her. The first stopped, waiting. The second looked around, then pinned her through her invisibility with a look.

A moment passed.

Then the first traveler pushed back her mantle, revealing grey eyes, grey hair, and a grey mouth set in a face the same dark color of hearthstone.

 _You are one of the chthonic gods,_ said she, in the rumbling god-voice of Olympus. _But I know not which one._

 _No,_ said the second goddess with her hive-insect tongue. _But I know you, Lady Athena, Goddess of Wisdom._

_You have found me. Who are you?_

_I am Nyx, Night incarnate._ She gestured with a hand. The night around them continued, undisturbed by their presence. _I was here before the world. Before the first fates were spun, before light came to give definition to the dark, before the Titans even cobbled together the first conception of the idea of Olympus. I am the House that holds the Underworld fixed to the mortal realm._

And Athena, to her credit, listened to this litany and did precisely what Nyx did not know she wanted: she put her fist to her breastplate and bowed.

_How may I be of service to you, O Night?_

Nyx opened her mouth, and it was like stepping into a hole. It was like visiting Persephone’s House garden for the first time in centuries and having the branches of the pomegranates immediately snarl in her face, gone feral in her absence. Like a promise, Persephone had said. Pomegranates always were a promise.

She almost said, my son.

Athena’s grey eyes flashed, alert, and Nyx swallowed and tried again.

 _The Lord Hades keeps his godling son like a prisoner in the depths of Tartarus, and it has become tolerable no more,_ she said, and watched Athena’s face change.

**Persephone.**

No pomegranates grew in her garden, above. Like the nettles, they always became something else.

**Nyx.**

The first attempts were short-lived.

This was expected.

Achilles said, _Practice. The more you know means the less there is that can catch you unawares._

Nyx said, _Patience. No shade has ever yet escaped, it should not stand to reason that you instantly do what they have not done in millennia._

Time ran differently in the Underworld, everyone said, so she knew not how it felt for him, these odysseys of his -- to first scale the daunting cliffs of Tartarus, to build a raft of skulls with which to ford the flooded realm of Asphodel, to traverse the innumerable, vast settlements of Elysium on foot without losing his way -- but he was gone for longer, and longer still. Five years would pass in the mortal realm before he would next emerge from the Pool of Styx, shaking himself off and steeling his jaw against his father’s scorn, and then six, then ten. The interference of Olympus kept his progress shrouded from her, except in glimpses.

It was during one of these spells that the Athenian general Pericles sent a delegation to the Persian capital of Susa to negotiate peace in the shadow of its broken ziggurats, ending a war that had lasted some forty years.

Her son the harvester came home shortly afterwards, greyer in the hair and broader in the shoulder, and bowed as he passed her in the hallway.

 _Hello, Mother,_ said he. _It’s been awhile._

And perhaps it was because Persephone was so near to mind -- had been, ever since Zagreus grasped her hands between his own and said, _I have to find her, I have to, please Nyx, won’t you help me?_ \-- but Nyx looked at him and it was a stunning bolt of a thought, that if the Queen were here she would go to him and loop his strong arm through hers and ask, _How was the harvest, Thanatos?_

It should have been a joke between them, Nyx realized, with a pang that fell through her as if dropped into a well. Persephone would have asked him questions when he was first coming into his powers -- _how are the seedlings doing, young man?_ and _what do you sense of them?_ \-- so this question, coming now, would have been a balm, an assertion of home. Here you are known. How was the harvest? _I do not like taking them before they are ready, my Queen,_ would have been his reply, and she would have laid her radiant head on his shoulder in sympathy.

But the moment passed.

And Nyx could not even reach for Thanatos as he strode by on his way to the Great Hall, so paraylzed was she by grief for what should have been.

Later, he let himself into the Prince’s quarters, huffing out a laugh as darkness and silence alone greeted him. _Are you sulking, Zagreus? Come on, you said you wanted the story when I had the time, so --_

And then Nyx coalesced out of the mirror and lit the Ixion lights with a motion of her hand.

He startled back from her, mouth snapping shut. She saw everything register in an instant -- that Dusa had not been in to clean the room, that the dust was years thick, that this was part of the House that hadn’t been occupied in a long time. The bed, the same one they’d once bounced on, conspired on, lost Mort underneath -- it was not a bed anyone lived in anymore.

Something moved in his eyes, but then he blinked and the mask was in place -- and Nyx despised that she knew it for a mask.

_Hello, Mother. That’s one of your mirrors, is it not?_

_It is,_ she agreed, and tilted her head. _Though that is not, I think, the question you intended to ask me._

_I --_

He stopped, and swallowed, and put his feet flat on the floor.

_I don’t want to hear the answer._

A beat, and then Nyx said it anyway, but gently:

_He is gone, child. He has left the House._

_Where does he intend to go?_ He asked, brows hunkered down. _He is your son and heir to Lord Hades. This is his realm._

Another long pause.

Then, with another heavy gesture, Nyx took one of the many leaning stacks of books and manifested a settee from it, then bid him to sit beside her.

He leveled her with a look. She folded her hands serenely, intending to wait him out.

 _You’re going to tell me something I don’t want to know,_ sighed her son the harvester, even as he gave in, setting his scythe aside and coming over to her. _Very well. What is it._

It was another flash of a memory, another sudden ambush to the undefended part of her, as smooth as a knife sliding into butter -- long afternoons, or such as they were in a place with no afternoons, just like this, Nyx reclining with Hypnos under one arm, Thanatos and Zagreus under the other, listening to them whisper and giggle until she got fed up with their wiggling, pinning them with her arm and saying, grumpily, without opening her eyes, _Sleeping, we are sleeping, I said sleeping is good for us,_ and them saying, _Yes, Mother,_ and stilling themselves into prim obedience until Zagreus couldn’t stand it anymore, turning and wrapping an arm around her neck and laying his cheek along hers, saying, **μήτηρ. μήτηρ.** _Tell us again how you created the House, Mother._

_Tell us how you made us._

**Persephone.**

She grew barley first, for necessity, and small parcels of wheat. Next she grew grapes and olives for the familiarity of the routine, then oranges for joy. Beans and cucumbers came easiest of all, unspooling out of the ground and tumbling off their trellises as fast as she could tie them up, so eager were they to see her. Melons stretched their vines over her fencing, and cabbages rolled their heads at her feet.

Downhill from this, where it would catch the runoff of her watering, she planted the flowers that would attract the bees necessary for the pollinating work. She made clay pipes for the carpenter bees and tall standing hives for the bumblebees; their chthonic accents buzzing in and out lessened the quiet between her ears. The first time she brought in an handful of cut blooms and dropped them into a cup and set the cup at the center of her table, something peaceful thunked into place inside her heart, well satisfied.

The cottage came less intuitively than the garden. The last time she’d watched one be built, she’d been knee-height and more interested in sneaking honey from the neighbor’s hives than she was watching her father work -- in her memory, her perception was skewed to a little girl’s height. She’d been tasked to carry the goats into their new pen, she remembered -- picked them up around their bellies, bent swaybacked with the effort, their legs sticking straight out and knocking against the posts as they bleated in protest. Zagreus her father had laughed, but when she was done he rested his big rough hand on top of her head, and she knew he was proud.

She had no goats this time around. No father, either. But she did have time. And patience.

When she left particularly good offerings, the river god -- if she’d been told his name, it’d slipped through the sieve of her grief, so she did without it -- would bring her necessities she couldn’t grow and hadn’t brought with her, and in this way she was able to obtain an axe, saw, buckets, and rope. She used the rope to pull down the oldest trees in her sanctuary, the ones that had been half-sagging over the river, and once she’d chopped them into roughly-even planks, she sanded them down and stood them up, and sealed the cracks between them with resin.

When it was finished, her first house was little more than a sleeping hut with a leaky roof, but then she made proper thatching and the leaking stopped.

She wanted to make a cistern next, because a need for irrigation had become a pressing problem in the summers, but trying to divert the river proved too unreliable.

She was just thinking she might have to give up and relocate her gardens to a less-optimal spot downriver, still within her sanctuary, when she got up one morning and heard a bell toll from the river. She stepped outside and saw Charon with a naiad in his boat. The naiad took one look at the area and said, _Oh yeah, babe, there needs to be a well here,_ and proceeded to make one in the time it took to find the stones to ring it. She didn’t speak to or look at Persephone once the whole time, and not knowing whose magic it was that shrouded her, Persephone stood as still as a newborn hare, and when they departed, the naiad said to Charon, _We’re square up now, right? You remember this when you come demanding payment, you greedy old goat,_ and he smoked back at her equably.

Persephone watched their retreating backs, until at last they rounded the bend past the fishpond and disappeared from sight. Inside her chest, she felt torn between bemusement -- to her, Charon was forever that young man installing a bureau in her room in the House because he worried she wouldn’t have one when she needed it, how on earth did he get from that to old goat? -- and something that it took her a long time to recognize as loneliness.

**Nyx.**

When the Olympian light cleared from the chamber, at last allowing Nyx to see again, clean-up was already under way.

 _\-- I mean, am I nervous?_ said the Prince of the Underworld, gainfully employed in sluicing the floors. Bits of wretch came up with sustained force. _Of course I am. I have plenty of time to think about it._

A resigned sort of sigh came from the other side of the chamber.

Zagreus ignored it. _Because what if it turns out ... what if I don’t like her? What if it turns out I’ve built up this … motherly ideal in my head and when I meet the real person, she’s … disappointing? How do I stop myself from being disappointed?_ He peered down at something between his feet, nose wrinkled. _Hey, was this me or you or Alecto?_

 _How am I supposed to know?_ Megaera snapped back, giving a hard roll of her shoulder to stretch out her wing before resuming pushing all the rubble into a corner. _No one asked you to stay and help._

_No one had to._

_\-- but while we’re on the subject, did you HAVE to knock down so many pillars?_

_THAT was Alecto,_ said Zagreus immediately, in the time-honored tradition of blaming whoever wasn’t there to defend themselves. Nyx’s sense of her daughter had become much weaker since Alecto’s transformation into a Fury, but it was still enough to know she was still in the Styx, reforming.

She caught the sound of her name, and turned that facet of her attention from the Styx back to the chamber in Tartarus.

_\-- and anyway, Nyx is a bundle of nerves about the House just sliding right off into oblivion, so it seems the least we can do is leave the place in better condition than we found it._

Megaera straightened up and thinned her eyes at him, incredulous.

He went red and scooted sideways to get out from under the look. _But no, what I’m REALLY getting at, what’s even worse -- what if she doesn’t like ME? What if I’m so much more unobjectionable merely as a memory? A baby can’t do anything to offend you, whereas I’m a grown man -- don’t make that face! -- with flaws she might not like. Meg, what if I ruin something for her?_

 _You’re being stupid,_ she snarled.

He gave this its due consideration, as it was usually true.

 _No,_ said he. _No, I think this is a legitimate concern._

 _You’re being STUPID,_ Meg said again, with emphasis. Her wing was outstretched to its full length, casting a broad shadow on the wet tiles. _So what? So what if she likes you better as an idea than the mess you are? So what if she sets you up to disappoint her? That’s on her. And you’d have your answer. She wouldn’t be the type of mother you’d want to know anyway._

For a long, long moment, there was only silence.

Softly, Zagreus asked, _What were their names?_

She blinked. _What?_

 _I should have asked a long time ago. Should have done a lot of things,_ he admitted with a rueful hike of his shoulder, and she shifted away from him, unsettled, because that was true of her too. But he hadn’t made a thoughtless, worshipful remark about Heracles in decades -- she had noticed the absence and hadn’t known what to make of it. _Your children. What were their names?_

_I never told you I had children._

_You didn’t have to. The first time you laid hands on me, I could hear your blood singing for them. Took me awhile to sort out that’s what was happening, but._ Another shrug. Another long pause. Zagreus waited, head tilted so it was his green eye primarily fixed on her -- or her profile, anyway, watching her throat work.

When she spoke, it came out in abrupt, hard chunks, like trying to chisel something fossilized out of bedrock.

_My sons didn’t belong to me. But my daughter. Deianara. Her name was Deianara. She was seven when we -- when we were all murdered._

_I’m sorry, Meg._

_Get out of here,_ she said, in a way that might mean ‘thank you’ but could also just as easily mean ‘go piss up a rope.’

**Persephone.**

Three hundred years passed.

She knocked down her wooden cottage and built another made of stone. She swept her front step clean and sat down in the shade to peel an orange. The chthonic blankets that had come with her were ratty, sun-bleached versions of themselves, cut into curtains; she watched the breeze tug at them until their tails trailed out the windowsill. The olive trees flipped the silver undersides of their leaves at her, and the bees hummed among her herbs. Her urns sat in a recessed alcove at the back of the house, full now of her own pressed oil, her own honey, her onions and pickled cucumbers carefully preserved. Scarecrows draped in her own chitons stood silent sentinel over her garden. She took a deep breath, and felt at peace.

Another century slipped by. Another.

A civilization somewhere to the east collapsed, turning the sky pomegranate-red with its burning.

Not even a river god could keep mortals from stumbling into her place then. It only stood to reason that hidden people looking for places to remain hidden would find hidden places.

It was a mother and her children here, a swift-footed farrier on a stolen steed there, at first, stunned by the wonder of Persephone’s garden and too dazed to make much sense of it. The god’s spell still worked to some degree; they only stayed long enough to catch their breath before pursuing the promise of sanctuary further west, or on the mainland. But then they started coming in more frequently.

She knocked down a wall of her cottage and built another room, remembering how greatly she had valued her privacy when it had been her suddenly thrust away from her homeland -- and she built another chair to place at her table, another set of dishware; things she had never needed, before. It had been … well, a very, very long time since Persephone had interacted with anything more sentient than the worms leaving their castings for her vegetables or the birds that ate them. She had to relearn it, all over again. Fortunately, one you learn common decency, you never truly forget it.

Of more concern was that one of them might guess _her_ true identity. The last thing she needed was for someone to go thanking Olympus for a goddess’s intervention and give away her exact location.

When it came to the ploy of _not_ acting like a goddess, she had mingled success. Shades were dead, and hard to impress; conversely, mortals were _too_ easy to impress, and Persephone had long lost her gauge for what was normal behavior for mortals. Silence in those situations was the better part of valor, so she shared her food, her roof, her seeds -- and gained some in return; in this manner she acquired ginger root from the southeast and potatoes from Naxos, among other gems -- and listened to the stories that brought these people to the banks of her sanctuary.

Some of the stories were the distracting, meandering epics she expected, about Olympus, about the gods, about Hades and his fearsome three-headed hellhound, about their homes. The Trojan War, the cautionary tale that was the Minoan royal family, the gargantuan bronze monstrosity called Talos that brought great cataclysm upon Mycenae -- all told to her now from the point of view of the living, where before she’d only heard it from the dead. She filled in her mental map of the Mediterranean, the Aegean, the Corinthian, the many independent Grecian poleis and the empire encroaching from the east. Thebes, birthplace of the Fury Megaera, had fallen to Persian control long ago, and still harbored mutinous feelings about it.

But more than that, they told her much smaller stories. About themselves, their families. A nephew who hadn’t believed anyone when told that fermented watermelons explode, and the shrieking hilarity that ensued. A case of mistaken identity that lead to a five-year misunderstanding on one particular street in one particular island. A daughter’s gap-toothed smile. A desk in a workplace with hidden compartments in a homeland now overrun with invaders, sorely missed.

“Thank you for listening, mistress,” they said to her.

And Persephone flattened her god-voice until she sounded no different than she had as a child, following her father through their fields under a wide light sky. “It was an honor to have heard you. Godspeed, my friends.”

It took a lot less work, she found, to pretend to be nobody special at all than it had to pretend to be queen.

**Nyx.**

To understand how things came to the confrontation they did, on Zagreus’s twenty-fifth attempt to flee the Underworld, you need to know what came before. 

Before he found his mother’s letter, and before King Darius I first got it into his head that the mainland of Greece, with its wealthy poleis and rolling farmland and well-kept roads, might make a fine jewel in the Persian crown, starting a war that kept the Underworld -- and Tartarus, realm of oathbreakers, especially -- very, very busy.

It began in the upper level of the House, where the Prince sat on a rug, mending.

There wasn’t much to be found up here; storage, mostly. Dusa had a nest, somewhere. He’d been up here a lot as a kouros, hiding from Megaera, back when they were still being senselessly cruel with each other, before they’d settled into their unhappy mutual agreement. Meg never came up here. She’d been once, and looked around -- there weren’t any doors on this level, just curtained alcoves -- and sniffed and said, _Looks like my father’s house,_ and never came back. If she needed anything from storage, she sent a lesser Fury to get it -- the Angers and the Irritations, as she called them.

Then the curtain twitched back.

 _Ah,_ Thanatos stopped short. _Zagreus. What are you doing up here?_

Zagreus’s head had come up, and for a moment he said nothing. He and Thanatos ran into each other so rarely that it jarred him still, that this was the same serious boy, now with broader shoulders and close-cropped hair. Then he shook it off, and smiled. _What does it look like?_

_I can’t even begin to guess._

_If you can’t keep your armor in adequate condition, then there’s no point in having it,_ Zagreus said, a passable imitation of one of Achilles’s most frequently-used phrases.

_All right, but you can’t convince me THAT’S armor._

_Well, no. See, there are these traps in Tartarus, they’re spike traps, right?_

Thanatos’s voice, somehow, got even dryer. _You’re actually out supervising in Tartarus? You’re doing work? You?_

 _So after I -- yes, thank you, Father -- so after I clear an unused chamber for the next occupant, I disable the spike traps so they don’t hurt anyone else._ He shrugged. _Most shades just mind their own business. They probably don’t want to be pincushioned because they stepped on the wrong tile. Sometimes I break my tools and have to repair them,_ he gestured to the spread of little metal bits on the rug in front of him.

 _Those traps are there for a reason,_ Thanatos said severely. _A shade doesn’t make it to Tartarus without being the kind of person who deserves to be pincushioned._

_You can’t truly believe that, Than._

_Yes, I do -- you know what, this isn’t worth arguing with you. Do what you want. You always do. The rest of us will clean it up._

He turned to go. Zagreus took time and space and bent it, fractionally, like a facet in a gem, so that one moment he was sitting cross-legged on the rug and the next, he was blocking the entrance in one dashed movement.

 _What is it, Than?_ said he, patiently, his hands spread in entreaty.

_Nothing, Zag. I just want to be somewhere else all of a sudden. Do you mind?_

Zagreus tilted his head. _You didn’t use to be dismissive. You used to be able to talk to me. Ceaselessly, sometimes._

 _You’re misremembering,_ Thanatos corrected, unable to help himself. _That was always you._

 _No, I’m pretty sure --_ And then he stopped himself, and grinned. _All right, say that’s fair. Well, listen. When you’re ready to tell me what it is that’s bothering you, you can tell me. You’re my brother, aren’t you? How is it that we stopped --_

He reached out, as if to touch Thanatos’s shoulder.

And something furious and utterly alien flashed across Thanatos’s face.

His hand shot forward, catching Zagreus by the wrist and twisting it, and whatever formative influences shaped his expectations, he did not expect to meet violence here in his own home, because he went into the hold without a sound.

 _Brother,_ said Thanatos, lowly and almost viciously, right in his ear, _is the LEAST of what you are to me. Do you understand me?_

They remained frozen in that tableau for one beat, then another, one with the other’s arm twisted up behind his back, and then Zagreus hitched a breath and reached for the curtain with his free hand, drawing it shut and inadvertently cutting a wider strip of shadow for Nyx to see with.

When he turned, Thanatos’s fingers sprang apart, releasing him.

Before he could step back, Zagreus caught him back and held him still. He kept one hand at his wrist for a moment, and then moved it, ghosting his fingertips over forearm to elbow and then jumping from there to an exposed slice of ribs --

\-- and they both inhaled, sharp.

 _You’re serious,_ Zagreus said in shock, breaking the silence.

_Why in Ha--_

_Don’t say it!_

_\-- hell,_ Thanatos diverted quickly. _Why in hell wouldn’t I be? And what are you doing?_

_I honestly have no idea._

It was only one hand, the touch of it so light it barely made a shadow, but the both of them were utterly focused on its progression, as Zagreus trailed his nails from Thanatos’s ribs up the blade of his shoulder and around front again. It skated over his gold collar, and there was a moment where it trembled, hesitated, and then he curled a hand around Thanatos’s shoulder and stepped them backward.

Their feet scuffed, overlaid, scuffed again.

Zagreus gave another light, experimental push, and Thanatos went.

 _You’re letting me,_ said Zagreus in wonder. _You would let me._

 _I TOLD you,_ Thanatos said, but the bitterness to it was crumbling away -- his eyes, wolf-yellow, shone very bright indeed. _There’s a lot I’d let you do, Zag. You’re just unobservant._

 _Unrepentantly self-absorbed, that’s me,_ Zagreus agreed, kneejerk, but then his head dipped, like he was thinking of resting it against Thanatos’s shoulder but couldn’t make it. _Was that why you were avoiding me?_

_Don’t give yourself so much credit. I’m fed up with you for entirely unrelated reasons._

_Oh well, I’m good at that too._ His voice fell. _Why tell me now?_

 _If I’d asked before,_ Thanatos’s voice was just as low, _you might have given it to me._

Zagreus’s brow furrowed, not getting it, but Thanatos didn’t stop to explain why that would have been the worst possible outcome. His eyes had dropped. And Nyx knew what was coming then, had seen this overture a thousand times in a thousand shadowed faces and sometimes even in situations not dissimilar to this, but Zagreus didn’t see it coming at all.

Thanatos’s throat moved, a compulsive nervous swallow, and then he put one hand to Zagreus’s jaw and thumbed his lips, which opened seemingly without thought, startling them both, and he leaned in to kiss that mouth made slack and ready --

\-- and Zagreus, of course, flinched back.

Nyx, who had been witness, knew at once that this was a remnant of Megaera, who similarly had been too afraid to _ask_ and find out just how cheaply Zagreus would give himself away, and so made him a challenge to be surmounted instead. In life, Megaera had expected every kiss to be a conquest and never learned how to control her reaction to them, even in death, and since it was a track run in her it became a track run in Zagreus, on whom she imprinted everything.

But Thanatos didn’t know that.

His eyes flared wide enough to show the black, and he jerked away.

 _No!_ Zagreus said, fast, and reached for him with both hands. _Wait, Than --!_

But -- a crack of green, and Thanatos was gone.

 _Damn it!_ He shoved his hands through his hair. _Damn it, damn it, blood and darkness, what am I supposed to do with that? How am I supposed --_

He stopped, made a strangled wordless noise, and then visibly took several deep, calming breaths.

 _I don’t have the ability to process that right now. Or the time. Obsess over it later, Zagreus._ He gave a short laugh, a little too high, a little too hysterical. _Or -- or -- talk to Meg about it! She’ll kill you just to shut you up!_

After giving it some time, Nyx cast out searchingly among her vast consciousness.

She found her son the harvester in a place between a place inside of a place, where the seas boiled overhead and the stars gathered underfoot like seed pearls. He sat with his blade in his lap and a shabby, oft-used whetstone in hand -- but of course, thought she upon manifesting, he’d gone up to storage.

He looked up. 

_Ah,_ he said. **μήτηρ.** _I suppose you saw all that, then?_

 _I did,_ Nyx confirmed, picking her way across the stars to him. _As I have seen all that came before, so please understand me when I tell you that what occurred was the cumulative reaction of a dozen actions, and had little to do with you._

His mouth set, mulishly -- Nyx knew how very little comfort it was to be told it wasn’t personal when it did, in fact, feel very personal -- but after a long moment it went away and he said, _I believe you. That doesn’t answer the question of what I do now._

_Well ..._

She sat down beside him, drawing her robe in close around her and tucking her feet under her. He watched her expectantly.

 _You could,_ she offered, _bury yourself so far in your work it renders you utterly oblivious to anything around you. I find that seems to be a common course of action for everyone else._

It worked. Thanatos blinked, then let out a sharp, startled laugh.

She smiled at him, and leaned in so their shoulders touched. The sky sank a little under their weight, spilling stars into her lap. Overhead, the ocean frothed, crested white with steam and salt; it would be millenia before it all boiled away. He resumed sharpening. The quiet stretched comfortably between them.

Sometime later, he spoke.

_I suppose I shall do what I had planned to do before, and work alongside him in whatever direction he is going. It is what I know of love._

Still watching the boiling waters, she hummed noncommittally.

Another beat. He darted his eyes at her.

_You’re not going to tell me anything, are you?_

_You know I will not._

_Thanks, Mother,_ said he, but not insincerely.

More time passed. He finished tending to his blade, her son the harvester did, and set it aside, but did not rise. Nyx waited.

 _I think it needs to be said,_ he ventured, finally. _And that is -- I’m sorry. I know I’m not as bad as Nemesis was, or Eris, but I’m sorry nonetheless. You have always been the best of mothers -- everyone says so -- and I never intended to be this kind of son._

 _What?_

She twisted to look at him and saw him deathly serious. Saying _no_ and _no_ and _NO_ again, she took him by the shoulders and pulled him into her side, but he turned his head away from her. She ducked hers, trying to catch his eye. 

_CHILD,_ she said, so sharply his head jerked up and nearly bashed her in the nose. _You listen to me._

_Don’t --_

_No. I am your mother. I made you. I made you on PURPOSE, and I would make you on purpose AGAIN, knowing everything I know about who you are. If I loved you any less for your choices, that would be my shame to carry, not yours. Do you hear me?_

She shook him, for emphasis.

_Do you hear me, Thanatos?_

_Yes,_ said he, dazedly. _I hear you._

_Then know this. I love you, no less than I love Nemesis and Eris. As I love terrible Talos. As I love Ixion the deeplight, as I love the Fates and the Graiae, as I love Mnemosyne and Selene and Aidos, as I love Hypnos, as I love Charon. And yes, even as I love Zagreus._

_But he’s an IDIOT!_ he burst out, and promptly hid his face as Nyx, unbidden, started laughing.

 _Oh my son._ She hugged him to her, as tightly as she dared, against the near-painful swell in her heart. It was overwhelming, the force of this affection; she was only one goddess, of unlimited consciousness. How could she be expected to contain it all?

(She thought about refuting the evaluation to the Prince’s intelligence, but it would be too egregious a lie and she couldn’t bring herself to do it.)

 _Do you remember the Queen?_ she asked instead. _I know you were very young when she left, but ..._

 _I … do,_ Thanatos said slowly. _And I know where you’re going with this._

_Oh? Where am I going with this?_

He looked pained. _You want me to admit, idiot or not, that I find him as radiant as you found her._

Her breath caught. He had, just then, come so close to the truth of it that the shape of it must be obvious. Likewise, she had never been so close, either, to speaking it true: _He is her son. He is not your brother._ But it was not Nyx’s secret to tell, and it would be unfair to ask Thanatos to keep it once he carried it.

 _What I think,_ she managed. _Is that someday -- and I do admit I am assuming much, as only the Fates know truly -- everyone will be able to see in him what you see in him, and he will remember that you saw him first._

He stood, abruptly, and retrieved his scythe. Hesitating only a moment, he returned to her and offered her a hand up. Quietly, he agreed, _As the Queen saw you._

**Persephone.**

She was at the very edge of her territory late in the afternoon one day, collecting kindling because the new shoots had been complaining to her about it -- a little litter acts as a good blanketing layer, smothering weeds, but too much is like getting mulched -- and listening for the parasitic suckers that would lie dormant underneath them, waiting for the right moment to climb up and strangle them. She felt the soreness in her back and shoulders because she expected it to be there -- goddess she may be, she was only one woman doing the work of a homesteader and several farmhands.

And then --

“Hold up,” a voice said, alarmingly close. “Something’s wrong.”

She froze.

For the span of several heartbeats, nothing moved. Not the trees, not the birds, and not Persephone. And then --

Ahead, by the river. A silhouette moved, head lifted in her direction and hand shading their eyes, curiously scanning in her direction.

Before she could duck away, their eyes met.

The spell broke.

“Hey!” he yelped, surging to his feet -- a young kouros, soldier’s colors, but not any color she’d seen worn by her refugees, and as he moved, so did the others, soldiers she hadn’t noticed -- six, seven, nine of them, surrounding her, and fear jackrabbited inside Persephone’s chest.

Their voices overlapped each other.

“What --”

“I thought he said nobody lived here.”

“-- that a girl?”

“If there are people,” said another, quietly, but not quietly enough, “then there’s food and water and _purse.”_

She cast a swift glance over her shoulder, but she was still within her own borders and she’d already been seen. The sanctuary spell wouldn’t hold.

“Hey, kore!” called one of the men, and Persephone decided.

She bolted.

She bolted, and they were after her, fast as foxes after a hare. 

Plunging downhill, she leapt over tree roots and wove away from the river, away from home -- she couldn’t lead them there, if they found her cottage once then they’d be able to find it again, and that knot needed to stay hidden, tucked away from the world. It needed to stay _safe,_ not just for her, but for the people who needed it. She heard the kouroi behind her, silent except for a shout here or there, the clanging of their weapons.

Kindling spilled from her basket, and eventually she dropped the whole thing, kicking her robe up her thighs to free her legs.

Twisting her head, she stole another look back -- and stepped straight into a snowdrift. She cried out in surprise, jerking off-balance -- snow, _here?_ It hadn’t snowed at the cottage! How could there be snow here, downhill? -- which renewed the shouts from behind her. She kicked the snow off and sped up again, her foot slipping around in her wet sandal.

She skidded around a bend in the path, and light surged across her vision, making her slam to a halt and fling up a hand -- 

Not a moment too soon.

The path ended, and the cliff plunged away. Pebbles kicked out in front of her went tumbling over the edge. Below, the ocean frothed and glittered. The sky spread horizon to horizon, dimming inexorably into melon-colored sunset. Her chest heaved.

Fatal fall ahead, hostile soldiers behind her, and --

\-- and --

And then her brain ticked and caught up with her.

Wait a minute. She was the immortal goddess Persephone, declared true to divinity in front of the assembled ranks of Olympus. What was she afraid of? She could not be killed. If her body was slain here -- if --

Oh.

If she was slain here, she would emerge from the Pool of Styx before the Great Hall of Hades. Same as any chthonic, or the pledged shades. For she was Queen. She was _still Queen._

Probably? Probably. To nullify her claim on the crown, Hades would have had to destroy their wedding contract, etched in stone, and this was the god that had scrolls filed floor-to-ceiling in their _bedroom._ He never threw away _anything._

It didn’t matter. She couldn’t let it happen. She couldn’t let her body be killed here. It would undo --

It would undo -- she couldn’t go back, she _wouldn’t_ she -- wait.

The world around her grew still. No sound in her ears. Nothing in her vision but the sea, and the light. Cold in her lungs.

She dragged in a deep breath, and turned.

Lifted her arms, palms facing down.

 _In the name of Persephone, the Queen,_ she said, god-voice building thunderous, and for just a moment she swore she felt the Underworld far beneath her shudder at the invocation, limning her in light -- felt, too, Nyx’s attention swivel like a shocked hand seeking warmth. _Wretches, to me! Aid your queen!_

Sigils burned through the snow. The kouroi shouted.

 _Aid your queen!_ Persephone cried again, and saw them form: a skeletal bloodless, a bonewringer and disfigured lout, one startled white witch and a host of thick-headed numbskulls. _Remove these invaders from our home!_

They turned. She stretched out her powers to aid them.

And it was easy.

For a heart, after all, is merely another form of pomegranate: a hardy plant, a sturdy fruit, and a promise, sure -- but only, in the end, something that pulped.

**Nyx.**

The Lord Hades threw his son down into the snow in front of the Temple and, calmly, deliberately, skewered him on the point of his spear. He leaned on it until it was no longer a body but a corpse, and then he returned to the House. One look at his face sent those who crossed his path scattering, but others weren’t fast enough.

He obliterated first the shade of the guardsman Achilles -- who rematerialized in the Pool of Styx and reminded the master, politely, that those were not the terms of his contract -- and then turned on the god-form of Nyx herself and slew her as well.

In return, she put a hand around his throat and yanked him into the unbound netherrrealm --

\-- and reminded him, less politely, that she built every stone of the House he called his own and she could dismantle him as easily as she could dismantle it, and the next he laid a hand on her he would lose them both like the Titans who came before him.

 _You are AIDING him,_ Hades bellowed back at her, incensed. _You speak of undoing the House but he could RUIN it all!_

 _IT IS RUINING ITSELF!_ screamed the space between the stars and him and the earth. He slammed his mighty hands over his ears.

She took hold of him, the night sky entire. _YOUR HOUSE CRACKS AT ITS HEART, HADES. THERE IS MORE THAT BINDS IT THAN MY POWER AND YOUR PAPERWORK AND IT CRUMBLES WHILE YOU SIT BLIND._

He went still, and Nyx’s fury flipped so cold the stars turned to pinpricks, sharp enough to cut.

_You knew!_

_I suspected,_ he growled back. _But it stood not to reason, not with all of us working as hard as we are. How can the House still fall, with us so dedicated to its preservation?_

 _You tell me,_ Nyx said coldly, and dropped him into the Styx.

By the time she pulled her consciousness together, her children at the House had whipped themselves into frenzied panic, the shades were in hiding, and even the Infernal Broker had squeezed themself into the hall to see what the commotion was about.

At the center of all this stood Zagreus, chest heaving, his hands spread wide in entreaty.

 _\-- don’t understand how that’s MY FAULT,_ he shouted, as Nyx tugged a towel off the rack in order to wipe the Styx from her face. So quiet was her arrival that nobody seemed to notice it -- except no, there was Dusa in the rafters, her tongues flickering anxiously. Her eyes met Nyx’s; she shrank back behind a beam.

 _He killed me!_ Zagreus said indignantly, in response to a comment Nyx missed. _And then he came back here and killed Achilles and Nyx! Sounds to me the only person at fault for those actions is HIM._

Several voices rose at once, but the loudest somehow managed to be Thanatos:

_It’s YOUR actions putting all of us at odds, Zagreus!_

Zagreus looked at him and he folded his arms. Hypnos stood at his elbow, droopy face pulled into a pout.

_Than --_

_They supported you and he went after them,_ Megaera cut over him furiously. _Who do you think is next? WE pay for your choices._

 _And that’s not RIGHT!_ yelled Zagreus, voice cracking in desperation. _That’s NOT how it should be done! If anything, all this does is prove how much things need to change!_

Predictably, this only resulted in more shouting.

And it -- it was so fresh on her mind, this talk of fracturing, that Nyx felt it as if the cracks in the House were her own skin -- and, of course, it was -- and just like that, it was too much.

With a cry, she surged forward, manifesting herself a form that became half-woman, half-spider, filling the whole space tile to ceiling, hideous and terrifying both. _ENOUGH,_ she bellowed with all her voices.

Then she did the first thing she could think of:

She banished them all to their rooms.

Silence immediately descended upon the Great Hall. Nyx heaved another shuddering breath, then sunk to the tile, folding her multitudinous legs underneath her until it all melted into fabric.

She drew her knees up to her chest and rested her head upon them.

The House in her and around her shuddered, and shuddered, and shuddered.

**Persephone.**

After scraping a new batch of lye off the top of her bucket, Persephone swept her floors until the bristles came off her broom, then got down and scrubbed ferociously. She (politely) evicted a family of dormice from her grain storage and cleaned that room too. Then, with her house presenting her a parboiled face with nothing further to scrub, she went out in her garden to inflict that terrifying feeling onto the weeds.

If her god-form was destroyed and she was returned to the Underworld, what would become of her cottage here? This sanctuary?

She didn’t imagine she could just climb out of the Pool of Styx, greet that long-faced guardsman Achilles, say “see you in a few centuries!” and leave again. Would Charon be able to spirit her away a second time? Would the king let her go? Would Nyx?

Would they be able to stop her?

It hurt, thinking of them, but it was the same kind of hurt currently in her shoulders and back, from scrubbing something until its tarnish had gone. The centuries had tempered her anger -- and oh, _oh,_ she realized now just how _angry_ she had been. For so _long,_ somewhere under the oppressive weight of all her grief.

She’d tended to an injured mortal once when he’d fallen onto her riverbank so tightly swathed in linen he looked, at first glance, like some dirty snow heap at the water’s edge, until she’d reached him and realized he had gotten this far and was about to drown in a finger’s width of water if she didn’t haul him up. When she’d brought him briefly back to lucidity, he told her he’d been aware that he’d been hurt, fleeing the invaders, and every time it pained him he wrapped another bandage around it, this being the extent of his medical knowledge -- unwrapping him had felt like unrolling a ball of yarn, and underneath it, the wound was a festering, fetid tear, so swollen with infection at the edges the skin had gone white with blood loss, seeping fluid everywhere.

That’s what her anger felt like. She’d wrapped it in so much grief she’d almost managed to forget it, but there it was, bleeding out all her strength.

They had left her alone.

They had walked out of the room and _left_ her _alone._

A dead baby, she’d held _her dead baby_ until it was taken from her and there had been no comfort -- not from her husband, and not from Nyx who saw all. They hadn’t even tried to stop her from leaving. “There is no escape,” blah blah, Persephone packed a bag and got on a boat and they didn’t even _notice._

“You chose to be queen,” she whispered to herself, softly, viciously, after the man had died and she anointed him and laid him gently in the Styx. 

She washed out his linens and wrung them dry, spending her helplessness on the effort. “You wanted that crown. You thought, oh, I shall be queen of a realm thrice the size of Hera’s, she’ll never look down her nose at me again. You thought, oh, Apollo will never again introduce me as the least interesting of his cousins. I will get to correct my mother if she ever tries to ‘kore’ me -- I’d get to say, ‘it’s Your Majesty to you, Mother’. You were willing to play the long game for that moment. You wanted it even though you knew nothing about the Underworld.” She stared at the backs of her hands. “Why do you get to be angry now, when it turns out you got a bad deal? You knew it was possible.”

Underneath that, a quieter voice whispered to her, _You believed it to be a hypothetical._

And it was true. Persephone wanted to be queen until she didn’t anymore.

But no one had released her from the crown.

So the goddess Persephone, Queen of the Underworld, picked slugs off her cabbages and shriveled blossoms off her tomatoes and options out of the limited pool of things she was willing to do.

Then she washed her hands, went to the open courtyard in front of her cottage, and relocated the table and chairs to a shadier area. She swept there, too, then knelt down and drew in the thin dust a sigil, and into the sigil summoned from the realms below a witch’s circle.

To say she surprised them would be an understatement.

Squeaking as rapidly as bats, they darted out from under the light, as wretches do, scattering to hide in the corners of the courtyard. The sunlight shone right through their bodies.

 _Wretches,_ said Persephone. Her god-voice didn’t fit any better than it had before, on the cliff with the soldiers, like trying to belt a peplos too tight. _Heed me, your Queen. To me._

They obeyed the command, trailing their staffs and flinching at everything from the light to the slightest breeze; sets of eyeballs appeared and disappeared on the fronts of their faces, blinking at her and then looking away again.

She explained to them what she required, and then she said, _But first, share food with me at my table._

They were instantly more at ease in the shade, and as she passed around porridge with honey, they stopped looking like wretches and started looking like people again. They squeaked and tittered to one another, and Persephone found that she could understand them, if she tilted her head and came at it sideways. She picked up some tidbits about the Underworld; most shockingly, that the Fields of Asphodel no longer supported any plantlife at all, having been ripped open by earthquakes and flooded with magma. She learned, too, a little about them: one splitter had been a sorceress from Egypt, who’d brought her sculptures with her on a merchant train and eventually met a Corinthian priestess and settled there; the silhouette-and-profile style art of the Egyptians became most prominently used in the black pottery Greece was so famous for.

 _You don’t get all the credit,_ protested the priestess, who sat beside her. 

_Yes I do,_ the sorceress answered, primly. _I took your gods as my own and gave them my pottery and they made it everlasting. So there._

The other witches all scoffed in unison, but not without affection. They were clearly used to her, and her ego.

When the afternoon had lengthened sufficiently for their purposes, they took up their staffs and marked the boundaries of Persephone’s sanctuary. Then they descended to the shores of Elysium and removed from there a number of the massive stone columns that had lined the river Lethe, absorbing its magic for aeons. These were placed atop their marks, until the entirety of Persephone’s sanctuary had been ringed in them. If she’d understood Mnemosyne correctly, all those years ago, then any who passed under them would forget how to return to where they had just been.

This, she hoped, would keep her cottage safe from those who would do it harm, and would allow it to remain a refuge for those who needed it. Should she ever be forced to leave.

**Nyx.**

In the lounge, Zagreus struggled to find words adequate for what he’d seen.

 _Like a hole punched out of the sky,_ he tried. _Just -- hanging there!_

Remembering, his face momentarily went glassine, like a pool, every emotion visible straight down to the bottom. He had yet to see any of the surface past the courtyard of the Temple Styx, where his father came in hue and helm to spill his blood, cutting short his quest to meet the goddess Persephone, his mother.

He shook himself. _It’s like -- like a facet in upholstery, but not faceted like a gemstone. It’s -- round, rounded like an Ixion pearl._ He snapped his fingers. _A button! Holding the night up!_

 _That sounds fake,_ said Hypnos suspiciously. _Are you making this up?_

 _He is not,_ Achilles offered. _It’s called the moon, lad._

 _You knew about this!_ Zagreus yelped, and then, remembering, _oh, of course. It must always be there. Mortals can see it?_

Achilles nodded. _Every night._

 _Sorry, that doesn’t make it sound any less like something you just made up,_ Hypnos protested.

But Thanatos said, _No, he’s right,_ and made a sudden shift in his seat as Meg kicked him hard under the table. They were not, in Nyx’s opinion, doing as good a job cold-shouldering the Prince as they thought they were, and if it came down to maintaining pointed silence or correcting his brothers, Thanatos was always going to err on the side of the latter.

Meg contemplated the inevitability of this, and then said, _Are we going to tell him it it changes shape, too?_

 _It does NOT._ Zagreus whirled on her, aghast, but his eyes darted to Achilles, who had sat up a little and gone, _ah, yes, I’d forgotten._

_It can’t!_

_Now you guys really are just making this up._

_Every night it’s different,_ Meg said, absolutely straight-faced.

Achilles was the first to start laughing at Zagreus’s expression, which made it all that much harder for everyone else to keep their composure. Soon even he had to join in, gesturing in defeat and beaming around at them all.

And Nyx felt it like something very small, something very new, being stretched for the first time. The same way she’d felt it when Zagreus paid to install the rugs and the wall sconces, the pot-bellied stove in the lounge and the statues in the west hall, the great vases of flowers by where she eternally stood. As if by making them laugh, without reservation, he was repairing something as tangible as the floors and walls themselves.

**Persephone.**

Moonrise came early in the winter months, and the goddess Persephone in her sanctuary saw it first as a reflection in the river, creeping towards her from the opposite bank. She glanced up to find its mirror a bright button in the pale afternoon sky, and smiled to see it near full.

When she finished her task some time later, she gathered her basket up on her hip and pushed herself to her feet and saw, all at once, that she had a visitor -- a small silhouette standing in between the nearest Lethean columns.

“Oh, hello!” said Persephone, shading a hand over her eyes. “I was just thinking how nice it would be to have someone to break bread with today, are you in need of … shel … ter?”

Slowly, the figure turned towards the sound of her voice, and Persephone’s words died in her throat as she realized her error.

She wore the shape of a child, as round and silver as Talos had been gargantuan and bronze; silver skin, silver hair, and eyes entirely without pupils, frosted all the way through and sunk back into her skull like craters. Darting a glance past her, Persephone saw that the moon had, in fact, crossed the river to her, its reflection bisected where the waterline ended.

 _Thank you for inviting me in, Queen Persephone,_ said the goddess in a humming beehive voice. _I have wondered many times what was tucked away here that I could not see._

“You are welcome in my home, of course, goddess,” said Persephone numbly.

She took one step back, and then another. Pebbles rolled under the soles of her feet. The goddess followed, watching her keenly.

_Do you know who I am?_

“You are the chthonic Selene, goddess of the moon and daughter of Nyx,” and Selene’s cheeks plumped instantly into a broad smile full of squarish baby teeth.

 _You DO know! You are shrouded from my mother’s sight and she cannot risk visiting you, but no such similar strictures apply to me. Worry not,_ she added swiftly, for Persephone was still backing up the hill, feeling uncertain and wary. _I have no interest in telling anyone where you are. Are you well? Mother will want to know you are well._

“I am well,” Persephone confirmed, ignoring the pain in her chest, and gestured. “You might as well come on up. Is there anything you need?”

 _Oh! Do you have anything toasted? I am always watching mortals toast things over their fires but no one thinks to offer any to me, the moon,_ and she did a very credible impression of a child’s sulk.

“I think I can do that,” Persephone said with a smile.

In short order, she had Selene seated at her table, feet swinging over open air as she crunched happily through toasted bread and honey. She licked her fingers when she was done.

“I would ask you how fares the Underworld, but --”

 _\-- but I do not get to visit it any more than you,_ she finished for her. _Is that not curious? The same way you were once a surfacer pinned to the Underworld, I am a chthonic pinned to the surface. I cannot go where moonlight does not shine, and that includes back home. Did Mother ever tell you about me, Your Majesty?_

“Please don’t call me that, goddess, I’m not the Queen anymore.”

Selene squinted. _Is that not a crown, there?_

Persephone reached up reflexively, touching the loose chain of flowers she’d made herself that morning, for no other reason than she wanted to and it made her happy. Compared to the headpieces she’d worn as Queen, it was so light as to be negligible. “No. This is just lavender.”

 _Oh._ She shrugged. _Looks like a crown to me._

Persephone conceded the point. She sat back, delving into her memory. It stung faintly, thinking of Nyx -- it probably always would, her and Hades both, they had loved her and then left her _alone_ \-- but since the advent of mortals finding their way into her sanctuary, she’d found her own appreciation for the Underworld growing. Both places needed to exist, for the mortals who needed it and they, the gods, were responsible for keeping it safe.

“She did, some,” she answered finally. “I know you were born to her early in creation along with several of her other daughters.”

 _The bad ones,_ said Selene unselfconsciously.

“Nyx never said that,” Persephone corrected, firm. Nyx hadn’t needed to; plenty of the others said it for her. “But I did get the impression they were a source of hurt. Or shame. I was never really sure which.”

 _Oh, of course. My sisters never really understood what she wanted from them, or if they did know, they had no idea how to obtain it or be it, so she kept pushing them away in disappointment and then wondered by they were so distant from her._ Again, that shrug.

Persephone frowned. She hadn’t meant shame of _them._ It’d been obvious even in the few conversations they’d had about it that Nyx’s shame had lain in how _she_ behaved. She knew she shouldn’t have been a mother then, and her children suffered for it -- were still suffering for it -- and Nyx worked every day to make sure she didn’t visit the same mistake on the children she had after them. But --

“Is that what she did to you?”

Selene’s silver eyebrows hiked in surprise. _What? Oh! No. I was born last. I had the opposite problem. The Night keeps the Moon as close as a button on her collar,_ and her mouth pulled. Not a smile, exactly, and in that moment it was obvious she was an entity as old as the Titans, crushed down eternally into a small child’s shape, perfect for cosseting. _She kept me too close._

After another beat, her smile fell away. She looked down at her empty plate, and used her fingertip to collect the remaining crumbs.

 _They tell you how to manage when you have an absent mother, or a disapproving one, but what do you do when you have one who cares too much? I always felt like she wanted me to be me and Eris and Talos and Nemesis, so if she did a better job with me it would make up for them. But I could only be me, Your Majesty, and even that is ..._ Another gesture at the moon, tucked against the darkening sky. _Defined by her._

“Yes, I know,” said Persephone, thinking of Demeter.

**Nyx.**

A spray of ashy flowers grew by the side of the river Lethe, and Nyx, at first, stepped right over them without looking. Then she turned and knelt down to be certain, but when she touched the petals it left a smear of grey pollen on her skin. She laughed. Asphodel, here!

Ahead of her, Mnemosyne shook her head. _What’s gotten into you?_

Nyx laughed again, and pulled a trick out of the Queen’s book, going to her daughter and taking her by the hands, swinging her around. Butterflies bumbled around them, and somewhere nearby a shade roared with laughter, sitting around a campfire with their compatriots.

 _Can’t you feel it?_ she breathed, still dancing. _It’s being undone._

 _What is?_ said her daughter Memory, smiling because she already knew the answer.

_Deceit and dishonesty. The damage to the House. It’s all unraveling, child, lie after lie after lie._

And Nyx was there, watching it all happen.

She was here by the Lethe, where the asphodel was blooming, and she was standing in the courts of Erebus, where shades mingled under a steadier light.

She was the dark square behind the Queen’s portrait.

She was the space between Orpheus’s fingers and the strings of his lyre, in that electric moment before the first note was plucked.

She was the warmth of Achilles’s palm, resting over Patroclus’s heart.

She was the shadow that lengthened across the pillow as Zagreus lifted his head.

 _You’re still here,_ he said in surprise, and Thanatos said, _Yes,_ and came to sit beside him, the mattress dipping beneath his naked hip. He offered a ladle, and Zagreus sat up drowsily to drink from it, hands cupped and eyes closing at the touch of cool water.

 _I have to leave soon. But,_ and here Thanatos’s mouth pulled. _The Fates are my sisters, and unlike SOME, I’m very polite to them. And if I ask -- if I tell them, say, my lover is inconsiderate and incorrigible and there’s nothing to be done about him --_

Zagreus looked up, delighted. _That’s rude!_

_\-- then they will stretch time for me. Besides, I’m not the only one with an imminent departure._

_Ah._ The preparations for another escape attempt had not gone unnoticed. _I’m getting faster,_ he offered, sounding much more awake. _Look, see, I think I’ve figured out the trick to Asphodel._

He stretched sideways, reaching towards one of the many teetering piles on the floor. Thanatos watched the length of bare flank this exposed to him, and the picture it made together with the familiar bed, the sheets pulled askew and pillows moved haphazardly -- a bed someone lived in, inarguably. His throat moved.

Zagreus got hold of the right pile and pulled something straight from the middle of it. The whole thing shuddered but did not tip, even when Thanatos lifted his eyebrows at it in disbelief.

 _Look,_ and he spread it out on the bedspread. _The Underworld actively resists any attempt to map it, but even it has patterns. That’s what I meant, about the chambers -- it’s the FIELDS of Asphodel, right, they’re all just islands, so they can’t actually be as untethered as they appear because they were chambers once. Are you listening, Than?_

 _No,_ said Thanatos.

Zagreus’s head came up. They regarded each other frankly.

 _Anyway._ Back onto the pile went the diagram, where only Nyx would see it for years. He showed teeth. _I’m not gone yet. You want me to stay a little longer?_

_Sure, but when has anything I tried ever worked?_

His head was tilted as he said it, mouth tugged up in exasperation, and everyone knew he meant it to be sarcastic but his voice betrayed him at the last moment; it cracked and went raw. It made a mess.

Zagreus’s eyes widened, showing black and white respectively, and Thanatos, mortified, twisted away. He pushed himself up, intentions clear -- although hopefully not to teleport, as scythe and overrobe were still where he left them, and wouldn’t _that_ cause comment -- but Zagreus, as ever, moved faster. His arms snagged him around the chest, pulled him close again. His expression, there against the back of Thanatos’s neck, was entirely in shadow, and Nyx saw him contemplate and dismiss several different approaches, from the comforting to the cajoling to the familiarly obnoxious, before finally deciding.

 _All right,_ said he, tipping his dark head to murmur right up against his ear, _but have you tried holding me down?_

And laughed, startled and bright, when Thanatos’s whole body jerked against him, forgetting itself and levitating a full two inches off the bed.

 _What?_ Zagreus tugged him back. _Oh, sure! Why doesn’t it surprise me that THAT does it for you, you goblin --_

But that was as far as he got.

There was a lot of laughter to those encounters. Well, Zagreus did most of the laughing, as Thanatos wasn’t much in the habit, but he smiled every time, proud to have made it happen. It was measurable, then, the distance they’d covered from the Prince who stopped to visit with her son the harvester on his balcony, hazy golden bottle in hand as an excuse to approach, or the Thanatos who said, _you’d LET me, huh,_ with audible bitterness and the Zagreus who flushed uncomfortably and muttered, _I wish I knew how to talk to you without always getting it wrong._ Or one of those secretive interventions, in a green, glittering wet field, when the momentum of a deathblow carried him careening into Thanatos, who grunted at the impact and steadied him, the both of them braced in the sudden silence, back-to-back, waiting for the telltale hiss of a forming sigil. When none came, they eased away, spare for the hand Thanatos still had at Zagreus’s back. His thumb moved across skin where the cloth had fallen down, absent and reassuring, and Zagreus -- hyperaware, still primed from the fight, electric with tension -- twitched away from it. Then his eyes changed shape, and he said, _Do you still want me?_ so direct it brought Thanatos’s head snapping around. _What,_ said he, and Zagreus shifted into his space in a deliberate way and said, _You could have me. Now. If you want,_ and Thanatos said, _What, here? With all the corpses?_ and, together, they glanced again about the field, scattered with the ghostly silhouettes of Exalted armor. _They’re fine,_ Zagreus said, _Yes or no, Than,_ and it was the closest they’d ever come to addressing it; that encounter in the upper level of the House, back when they still believed themselves to be brothers and Thanatos, sick with want, had tried to kiss him, heedless of what it would make them both to succeed. That man had been left behind, and Thanatos dropped his hand and said, _No,_ flatly, and, _Don’t get yourself killed, Zag,_ and vanished, leaving Zagreus to scrape at his skull and drag in several deep breaths until his body stopped clamoring for sex or violence or both. It would be another three years and as many chambers before the goddess Aphrodite tilted her head and said, _It was a lie,_ and he blinked at her. It was raining in that part of Elysium, and he had his shawl tented over his head, trying to keep his flaming feet from steaming in the mud, and right then sex was the furthest thing from his mind. _What was, my lady?_ he said, and she drummed her nails, _the broody one. I know these things, dearest,_ and he sighed, _Oh, right. I figured it might be, but that’s for him to learn, not me._

And so for them to be here, now -- it pleased the immortal Nyx.

Similarly, she, too, was the darkness inside Megaera’s clenched fist, the long shadow of her driven into Zagreus’s tiled floor like a sword into stone.

She stood in the center of the room, so still that the Ixion lights dimmed to nothingness without her movement to wake them. Darkness spread strange shadows from the stacks of books and skulls, the armor rack, the scrying pool. When Zagreus came in, they flared green again, illuminating Meg standing there. Her chin jerked up. He came to an abrupt halt.

 _Meg,_ said he, and his eyebrows knitted. _Are you all right?_

_Of course._

_Um. Is this about what I said earlier -- ?_

She cut him off with a gesture.

 _Come here, Zag,_ she said, in that subterranean scrape of a voice, and for one beat, then another, he didn’t get it, and then his eyebrows sprung apart again.

_Oh. OH. Really?_

_Don’t make me say it twice._

And he did, he came towards her, but not in the way she was expecting -- he skirted around her, staying well out of her reach, and sat down on the foot of his bed. When he turned to her, Meg realized with dawning horror that the look on his face was _seriousness._

 _By the blind and creek,_ she muttered under her breath. _You’re going to do this NOW?_

 _You don’t have to do it like this, Meg,_ Zagreus said to her, earnestly. _You don’t have to make me do anything._

Megaera, who’d shaded her face with a hand in embarrassment, flipped it up to scoff at him incredulously. _THAT is the most bald-faced lie you’ve ever said to me._

_No, it’s not. I’ll prove it to you. Just TELL me -- tell me to do anything, and -- while we’re here, at least, like this, I can’t make any promises about out there -- I’ll do it. You don’t have to force me._

She hesitated, looking wrong-footed. This wasn’t going how she expected it to. But wasn’t that why she was here? Because Zagreus told her she was always welcome, and she wanted to know what changed?

 _You don’t have to force me, and you don’t have to force yourself._ Zagreus was still talking. Of course he was. _You think the Titan blood, your career, is the only way you can keep everything under your control, and I am telling you, I will work alongside you in whatever direction you’re going, no matter what happens here. This is different._

 _We didn’t do a good job keeping this different before,_ she pointed out.

 _I know,_ said he. _It’s a good thing we’re immortal and have infinite chances to learn better, isn’t it? Meg,_ and he was speaking very quietly now, so that she had to step closer just to hear him. _You’re the very best when you’re at your best. I want this to feel good for you._

And that, of course, is what came up in her shadow for the backstab.

She blinked, fast, several times in a row. Her husband, as Nyx understood it, hadn’t been cruel as a habit -- up until the murder thing, of course -- but nor had he been concerned with much beside himself. She had nowhere to put the sentiment. It had never been said to her, not in all her life and all her afterlife.

 _Put your hands flat,_ she managed, in a voice gone so low and hoarse it might have been dug up out of a pit in Tartarus, and his hands snapped to the bedspread, starfishing out. _And don’t touch me._

She went to him then, hiking her long tunic up her thighs to better straddle his, and Nyx was the shadow in the hollow of her throat, where Zagreus exhaled all at once, in relief and trembling joy, and Meg felt it.

Later, after, she lifted her palm to study it in the low light. It was pale, unmarked.

The first time she’d drawn his blood had been in the middle of a scrap in the courtyard; she’d seized him by the elbow and pirouetted, driving him headfirst into a pedestal. The fight ended there, as she froze to the spot when he came reeling back, spitting angry and face smeared from crown to chin. No one had thought to warn her. The last time she’d seen red mortal blood was -- 

Well.

There’d been an incident after that, unseen by anyone except themselves -- and, of course, Nyx -- where he’d tried to roll her onto her back and she’d punished him for it by making talons and raking his shoulders to ribbons. She’d held her hand up then much as she was doing it now, finding it tacky and marbled with blood, and self-loathing came creeping up beneath her to make a chokehold of her throat.

Zagreus, then, had sat up and taken her hands in his without hesitation.

It … was hard to describe the significance of that, if you weren’t Greek. To take a man’s blood-covered hands was also to take his guilt and make it your own, legally, to tell all the world there was no distinction between his actions and yours.

The gesture was not lost on Megaera, murdered wife of bloody hero Heracles.

Of course, the Zagreus of then ruined it immediately by saying something callow, but the Zagreus of now merely took her hand in his and let them rest together.

Meg pulled her wing in close, for comfort, and then, entirely to her own surprise, said it out loud. _You make me want to change direction._

He lifted his head from her hip. _I -- erm, what?_

_You said. You said, whatever direction I was going, you’d work with me in that direction. Alongside me._

_I mean it, Meg._

_Yeah, I know. It makes me want to … evaluate. It makes me want to be sure I’m going in the right direction. I guess. I mean, I know I’m right, but. To be certain. You make me want to be certain._

It came out clipped, and frustrated, and it didn’t help that Zagreus was smiling even as he sat up. He took her face between her hands and kissed her, and it pleased Nyx that two things could be true at once: that Zagreus kissed like his mother, with both hands and eyes open, and that Meg did not flinch.

**Persephone.**

Some refugees stayed with her long enough to see the seasons change.

One was a young woman named Aenapa, a big-shouldered, barrel-chested highlander who’d chafed through her little mountain village upbringing up until the very moment they completed construction on a bridge that made it possible to bring large trade caravans through. She and her closest friends planned to open a moneychanging shop, as this was still before the age of a unified Greece -- every poleis had its own king and its own currency, and they were poised to make a _fortune,_ located where they were.

When the invaders came, they destroyed the bridge and razed the village. Aenapa climbed into the mountains with the goats, too high for soldiers who weren’t accustomed to the altitude, and was the only one who survived.

There was so much to mourn afterward she clearly didn’t know where to begin; her village, its hopes, all the work it had put into that bridge just to bring some vitality to itself, her family, the friends she had been so certain she was about to build a life with. Persephone fed her and accepted her help with the crops and gave her busy work to do when the nightmares woke her in the middle of the night. This war would make so many into fodder for the ever-hungry Titan blood, and she was determined not to let at least this one become a potential Fury.

“I should have gone back for them,” Aenapa said hoarsely one night, so late it was early again.

“Where were they?” Persephone asked carefully, cognizant of the bruises under her eyes, dark as date pits.

“They’d gone to temple to make a sacrifice to Athena.”

“... not Ares?”

She shook her head. “You pray to Ares for victory, sure, but every army prays to him for that. He’s not invested in helping you _end_ a war. It’s Athena’s wisdom that would best aid you there. Or so they reasoned.”

“That’s an astute observation.”

A sharp shrug. “Didn’t help them.”

“No. I’m sorry.”

She remembered this part. Not that she’d ever lived through anything like that exactly, but. When her son died, there hadn’t … hadn’t been much _to_ mourn, because he’d scarcely only lived an hour, and so Persephone instead found herself overwhelmed with grief for everyone he _could_ have been. What would he have looked like? How would he have laughed? How would he have avoided fulfilling the Fates’ design -- avoided being Hades’s heir? Whose powers would he have inherited? Who would he have loved, and would they have loved him back? She invented a hundred possibilities, and she wept for them all.

“I think I might like to die here,” her guest said to her some other evening. “Would you mind terribly if I did that, ma’am? I would feed your flowers.”

“I would mind,” Persephone said, setting an ewer down beside her. “My flowers would thank you, but I would mind.”

Aenapa spared her the ghost of a smile, as difficult to form on her face as cold clay would be to mold, and they broke bread together. “Could use some cheese,” was the only remark made, and Persephone, unoffended, replied, “Do you see any goats here?”

When they finished, she settled into a recline, disinclined to move, and Aenapa sighed.

“Everything I planned had them in it,” she said eventually, and Persephone turned her head to show she was listening. “Even the smallest actions feel like traps now, because I had always planned for them to be with me when they happened. I cannot imagine a way forward for myself. Most of the time … I don’t want to.”

Her voice dropped.

“How can anyone survive this?”

“Slowly,” Persephone answered. “Minute by minute, at first, then day by day.” She turned her head towards the river. “I would tell you it’s gradual, a gradual improvement, but that’s a lie -- some days you’ll feel all right, and then it will all come crashing into you again, as fresh as when it first occurred.

“You know -- you know how you hear a song once and then it doesn’t matter anymore, for the rest of your life all you have to hear is a few notes played and suddenly it’s stuck in your head again? It’s like that, but in your skin. Your arms will always remember how it felt to hold them. You’ll be able to conjure the feeling at a moment’s notice. For the rest of your life.” A beat. “But you’ll survive.”

“ _How?”_ Aenapa pressed, thick-voiced.

This, Persephone thought on for a long time, and finally she rose and went into her trees.

She returned with an orange. It wasn’t the season for them, but that didn’t matter when you were a goddess and willing to cheat for someone else.

Aenapa sat up abruptly, and said, “Is that --”

“By joy,” Persephone said over her. She peeled the fruit, passing her a segment. “By one little joy -- by one thing that isn’t awful -- and then another, and then another.”

She took the peel to her scrap pile, and when she returned she said, “I planted wheat and barley simply because I didn’t want an empty belly. I planted olives and grapes because they keep me occupied from spring to fall. But oranges -- oranges I planted for joy.”

“I haven’t seen one in years,” Aenapa said reverently. “They don’t grow much in Greece anymore.”

“Really?” Persephone frowned. “They were everywhere when I was a child.”

“They don’t like snow, I think, and they’ve had snow as far south as Egypt, so it’s destroyed a generation of crops,” Aenapa said. She put the last segment on her tongue and closed her eyes.

**Nyx.**

With sufficient application, Zagreus repaired the Eldest Sigil in the administrative chamber of his lord father, and Nyx descended between the realms with no more difficulty than it would take to descend a flight of stairs.

She reunited there with Primordial Chaos, with whom she had not spoken since they called her dull and, with unthinking dismissiveness, turned away to find something else to entertain them.

Words were not a particularly sufficient medium to describe how they existed in the same space. There was darkness, and something that wasn’t a darkness that she understood to be apart from herself, and everything that was apart from herself was everything Chaos was. That was how it began, at well; the chaos, the darkness, and then the things that were their creations.

At some point, she asked Chaos a question, and they thought on it for the blink of a star’s life.

 _I CANNOT TELL YOU WHAT I CANNOT QUANTIFY, OFFSPRING OF MINE,_ they told her, finally. _FOR THERE WAS NO PARENT BEFORE ME, AND THUS NO PREREQUISITE THAT COULD BE FAILED._

She waited.

 _IN ITS OWN INSUFFICIENT WAY,_ continued what was not darkness, that which had made her and held her so dear it stunned them when she had not loved them so whole-heartedly in turn. _I WOULD DESCRIBE IT TO YOU ONLY AS THIS -- TO BE A PARENT IS TO BE PROUD OF WHAT THEY BECOME. AND THEY BECOME WHEN THEY FIRST DRAW BREATH, AND SO. SO YOU ARE ALWAYS PROUD._

_AND IT IS THIS PRIDE THAT PRODUCES IN YOUR BEING A SENSATION LIKE BEING STUNG, AND IT IS THIS STING THAT PROPELS YOU FORTH, INTO ALL OTHER THINGS._

_IT IS MY UNDERSTANDING THAT THIS IS GENERALLY REFERRED TO AS LOVE. EVERYTHING YOU DO, YOU DO BECAUSE YOU ARE STINGING, BECAUSE YOU LOVE, BECAUSE YOU ARE THEIR PARENT. DO YOU NOT AGREE?_

_Yes,_ agreed Nyx, quietly.

**Persephone.**

After years of seeing refugees fleeing one way, a traveler chanced upon the sanctuary of Persephone going the other way.

“Grandfather,” said she, for he was also older than most everyone she’d yet seen; older than her father had ever lived to be. His ears had grown to be enormous, whiskery jughandles, and between his giant brown liver spots and his lipless unsmiling mouth, he looked not unlike a spotted lizard, washed up among all her greenery. She wanted to put a napkin over his head and relocate him. “I cannot promise you safe sanctuary beyond this point. The soldiers have already come this far.”

“I know that, kore, I’m headed that way on purpose,” said he, impatiently. He sat at her table, a cool cloth laid across the back of his neck. His skin was still mottled with exertion from coming down the river.

“But why?” said Persephone, baffled. “They burned all the land back. There’s no opportunity in that direction, unless you’re a soldier, and forgive me, but I don’t think they’d take you as a recruit.”

“Ha,” he said, humorlessly, and she thought that was all she’d get, as he examined the worn soles of his shoes, except then he said, “My daughter was sent that way to be wed. She has a daughter now. I haven’t heard from them since the siege.”

“You think they’re still there?”

“I have to know.”

Persephone hesitated. Then she said, gently, “That’s quite a journey to undertake on just a chance.”

His hands tightened on the cloth. Droplets darkened the front of his tunic. He stared between his feet at her swept floors.

Then his head came up.

“Wouldn’t you?” he said, suddenly, fiercely. “If it was your kin? If you were sent to crawl through, say, the underground crypts at Hentha, or to hike through Hephaestus’s burning mountain, or to pass unseen over Charybdis in a rowboat -- just to see their face, just to -- just to _speak_ to them -- just to spend fifteen minutes with them once more? Wouldn’t you do it?”

His voice ran out, and pain blindsided her. Unbidden, her arms lifted and shaped themselves around the phantom weight of an infant in them, whose shape was imprinted on her forever. 

If he had lived -- 

“Of course,” she said. “Of course.”

**Megaera.**

_Tell me something, Zagreus,_ said she. _How many mortal years does it take you to reach the surface?_

From behind the one-eyed skull of a cyclops, a head emerged with some difficulty in order to point an indignant finger at her.

_Don’t you listen to Than! I can cut Asphodel from a ten-year voyage to a five-year one, whatever he says, just you watch._

A pause.

 _Okay, I’m exaggerating, it’ll still probably take at least six. But what’s the point if you don’t strive for something, right?_ He sucked at his bottom lip in absent thought, then shrugged and sat down to lace up his bracers, one of which just had to be retrieved from -- how did that work? Megaera was not going to think about it, it would only hurt her head.

 _But that’s my point, Zag,_ she pressed, frustrated. _All that time to cross the whole Underworld, only to die within hours on the surface?_

 _That’s long enough,_ he protested. _She can’t live far from the temple. I’ll find her soon, I HAVE to._

She folded her arms. _Hours,_ she insisted, louder. _And then you die and come back here, only to do it all over again. Why put yourself through that?_

Slowly, he stilled.

For a long moment, neither of them moved; him staring down at the ground between his feet, her staring down at the crown of his head, until finally he looked up and met her eyes directly.

 _Wouldn’t you?_ said he, so gently it hurt.

Megaera broke, and looked away first.

Unbidden, her hand crept to her side -- hip height, at just the right level it had been once to muss Deianara’s hair. 

It was a stupid question.

**Nyx.**

She, the goddess of night, covered her head and went to the Fates.

They moved from realm to realm as whim befitted them, and today she found them on the surface, on an island in the Aegean Sea with white sands and tenacious gulls making loud sport out of the surf. Nyx contemplated this, then manifested a wide-brimmed hat to add to her ensemble. She’d intended to come at night -- naturally -- but one only appeared before the Fates at a time of their choosing. Typical.

Her daughters bore the shape of three small, stumpy women, barefoot in the sand and browned by the sun, foreheads protruding so low it seemed at a glance that they were made of only eyebrows, no eyes.

Which was, of course, true.

 **μήτηρ!** called Lachesis. _So glad you came. Here, try this._

A drink was shoved into Nyx’s hands. It was, incomprehensibly, made from the shell of a coconut. A beat later, Lachesis propped what appeared to be a miniature parasol in it.

 _Thank you, my child,_ Nyx managed.

Lachesis took her elbow and towed her over to her sisters, seated in the shade of a weathered lean-to. These were Atropos, and Clotho, who had taken Alecto’s place as the Spinner. She was not Nyx’s daughter by birth, but had become one when Lachesis and Atropos had tied their fates to hers. Nyx knew very little of the woman herself, but her loom certainly looked more complicated than Alecto’s sharp little wheel had been. More modern.

They did not stand and bow at her arrival, for the Fates bowed to no one.

Her daughter Atropos called, _Oh, hey there, Mother! What’s up?_

Nyx blinked, nonplussed. 

_What she means is, what brings you to us?_ Lachesis settled back into her chair and propped up her sandy feet. She reached down and pulled some kind of lever, and it promptly reclined to accommodate this. Nyx blinked some more. Then took a sip from her drink, as there seemed naught else to do. It was very fruity.

Lachesis continued, _We expected you earlier, honestly. To ask us what you must do to stop the fall of the House of Hades. So why come now, when you are sure of its survival?_

_I suppose, my daughters, I wished to ask -- what would it take to end it? Truly?_

_Everything ends,_ said Atropos, without sympathy. A pair of shears lay quiescent in her lap. _You may think yourself the AI of a vast spaceship, all-seeing and everlasting. But even you will end, Mother Night, when the night has run its course and the sun no longer sets._

 _Will the House survive after I am gone?_ she blurted, because it was either that or ask Atropos what any of that meant, and she knew well that her daughter was the type who defined incomprehensible words with other incomprehensible words and then got annoyed when that clarified nothing.

Three sightless faces turned to her in exasperation.

Her hands trembled. She took another drink.

Then Lachesis, the Drawer of Lots, said to her, _Of course it will,_ with the impatience that comes with being absolutely certain. _You have an heir, do you not?_

 _What?_ said Nyx blankly.

_An heir._

_An heir?_

_Is she being dense?_ asked Clotho of her sisters.

_I beg your pardon, I know not of what you speak. I have never declared an heir. I am the Night. I am --_

Her jaw clicked shut.

 _You are immortal, not eternal,_ Atropos finished for her. _As we just established._

_No, I know. It is just. Of all my children, there are none who … They lead their own lives. I could not ask any of them to give that up to become the House._

_You do not have to. He lives there already. He knows its secrets. Has he not worked tirelessly to strengthen it with his efforts these past centuries?_

Nyx blinked in increasing confusion. _But all who live in the Underworld serve the House. That does not --_

Snip, went the scissors of the inexorable Cutter.

As if from a great distance, she heard their wielder say, _Oops, someone better catch,_ presumably to Hermes or Thanatos or Charon.

And, as the mortals say, the other shoe dropped.

She swayed.

 _Sit down, Mother,_ said Lachesis, firmly, and not a moment too soon, for the knees of her god-form proved unequal to the task. It jarred the hat from her head, leaving only her himation pinned and mantled around her face; humility before the Fates. Somewhere, somewhere very distant, the sea crashed and the gulls scolded it.

 _But -- but --_ said Nyx helplessly. _He is -- he._

Unreclining her chair with a grunt, Lachesis leaned forward to make a portent of bone and fish scale on the table in front of her, then bent blindly over it.

She said, _We told the Lord Hades aeons ago that he would never have an heir. His child was not his to have. The best he can hope for at this point is a child who does not hate him. By the Fates, he who is named Zagreus will not be God of the Underworld like his father before him,_ and even here, the world shuddered plain acknowledgement of the truth. _He will not be lord of the dead._

 _But,_ said gently-spinning Clotho. _He WILL be the House._

Nyx squeezed her eyes shut.

 _He is the son of Hades and Persephone,_ she managed, voice quavering in a way she cannot remember happening before -- except perhaps once, when Hades put a hand on her muzzle and said only, she is gone, and Nyx had said, what, in a voice as cracked as the stones beneath her. _How can he be my heir?_

 _Tsh!_ Atropos waved a hand. _That’s just his blood._

Nyx opened her eyes and stared at her.

 _All of us,_ said she, the cold-blooded Cutter. _We are all made of blood. But are we also not mettle? Are we not forged by those with whom we share our time?_

She flung out an arm in Clotho’s direction. Clotho, who was not born of Nyx but who was included whenever she spoke of her daughters, the Fates, by virtue of the fact she was there, with them, doing the work.

Here, unexpectedly, Atropos softened. 

_Mother,_ she said, and set her scissors down. _Is the Prince of the Underworld not your child -- you who forged the Underworld, you who forged him, you who love him as you love his mother, the radiant Queen?_

Nyx looked at her, then at Clotho, then at Lachesis.

They’d asked her why she hadn’t come before, when the House was in its most dire straits. It wasn’t that it hadn’t occurred to her, she realized, because she was of vast consciousness and everything had occurred to her at least once. It was because she knew what they would tell her. One solution would have been to kill the son and return to the House what she had took; the foundation stones and the gem-lights and enough darkness to repair the Sigil. She had not come because she’d already known she could not hear that advice and survive it.

 _I think,_ said Nyx, goddess and current heart of the House of Hades, until she won’t be anymore. _I would like another drink. I seem to have dropped mine._

 _Of course,_ **μήτηρ.**

**Persephone.**

She woke early, as she usually did, rose and washed her face and broke yesterday’s bread into a mealy paste. She ground it together with fishbones from her scrap pile to make bone meal for her flower bulbs. When she went out to scold the butterflies they were not yet awake, perched on the coneflowers and lazily beginning to move their wings as the sun cleared the horizon and fell on each of them in turn. She was fairly certain that over the generations, they’d begun to alter their migration path simply to come to her farm.

“You can’t keep that up,” she told them as she went past them to the well. “What if I’m not here? What if the winter swallows me too?”

And then, in the middle of that, she became aware --

\-- the quiet, first, as the birds, disturbed, stopped their singing. Persephone stilled, and turned her head. 

Something was wrong.

She set her bucket down to free her hands, which had the power to pulp the pomegranate hearts of mortals. Her nostrils flared, caught the scent of burning grass.

A rustle.

There. The shape of something moving at the treeline, watching her. Refractive gleam off animal eyes.

Wolf, she thought immediately, and then, just as fast, no. Too tall. Only one eye.

That was no animal. No refugee, either. Nothing mortal at all.

It wavered. Hesitated. A shiver went down her spine.

She stood, and called, “Who’s there?”

**Nyx.**

A sigil appeared on the floor of the Great Hall and a wretch manifested out of it. She paid little attention until it approached Hades’s throne and, with alacrity, was acknowledged and brought in close. Whatever was said, it made Hades _tsch_ in impatience and rise, and Nyx felt a familiar swoop of dread a moment before he summoned his helm and weapon to him.

She was no longer the only one watching now. He shook out his cape to make it flare and then strode from the hall.

Absent-mindedly, Orpheus plucked his lyre strings and said portentously, _The Lord Hades Departs to Slay his Son,_ and then, much less portentously, yelped when all three aspects of the House Contractor stretched over the table to smack him.

The House continued on in Hades’s absence. Conversation burbled in the hall, where Hypnos was saying, _can you spell that, maybe?_ to the shade in front of him, tongue poking out in concentration. A kettle whistled from the lounge, and dishes clattered. Nyx stretched her consciousness out, but the place where father and son met was shrouded from her -- as few others were. She saw Sisyphus’s shoulders bunch with his next heave, saw the boulder named Bouldy take its own weight for a moment to help him. Saw Alecto sharpening her blades, grindstone between her knees where a spinning wheel had once been. Saw Thanatos in the shadow he cast through the doorway of a mortal household. Saw Mnemosyne drag her laundry up out of the River Lethe, humming to herself, and saw Daedalus swipe his cap from his head to wipe his brow, staring down at his drafting table with satisfaction. She came back just as Cerberus squeezed himself in through the dog door. He trotted over to his pallet, dropping onto it with a weary canine sigh and pricking an ear towards Dusa, who had come over to attack the muddy pawprints with gusto.

The Pool of Styx bubbled.

 _Could you excuse me?_ said Hypnos to the shade, overbright. _I have to take care of this._

And then Hades rose from the Pool, one heavy footfall on the step, then another. He wrung out his beard. His feet spluttered, then flared fiery orange once more.

Hypnos’s mouth opened and closed, his clipboard and its fresh registration form sagging in his hand. Hades strode past him without acknowledgement, and the top sheet caught fire and burnt up. Her son the dreamer squeaked and beat the embers out on his blanket.

Nyx moved.

She didn’t intend to. One moment she was at her post, and the next she wasn’t. 

Achilles started at her sudden appearance, behind him and a step to the left, and then reached blindly for her hand.

Hades passed Cerberus and resumed his throne. To the wide-eyed House Contractor he said, _Do you have that invoice I asked you about?_ and picked up his quill.

Nyx glanced at Achilles, found him looking at her too. They gripped each other’s hands, fierce and white-knuckled. Hope, Nyx found, was the most painful thing she’d been asked yet to carry.

 _Do you think --_ he started in a whisper, but stopped, because it was obvious.

She nodded at him.

His eyes shone. _Everything changes now, Mother Night._

Her chest felt swollen, beestung, as if her heart had gotten so big it could step outside of her god-form and walk beside her -- the feeling that Chaos had called pride, the feeling Persephone had called love. _What else is healing, Master Achilles,_ said she, _but a form of change?_

And then the Pool began to bubble again.

Nyx and Achilles turned. So did Hypnos, as another registration form materialized from the air and floated down onto his clipboard. Hades did not so much as lift his head.

Where his father had risen from the water noiselessly, grim and purposeful, Zagreus came up coughing. His returns weren’t usually artful -- why would they be? -- but this was different. He hauled himself out gracelessly, and stood there a long moment, distinctly pale-faced and wild-eyed and dripping onto the tile, hands working through his hair again and again until it was completely pulled out of shape. Nyx ached, but Achilles held her fast.

 _Wow. Would you look at that?_ chorused Hypnos, oblivious. He’d just now looked at the registration sheet. _That Redacted guy didn’t kill you this time! Good job, Your Highness, I thought you’d never get there._

 _Thanks, Hypnos,_ said the Prince on automatic.

Which at least was one question answered. But …

He started in one direction, stopped. Started in another, stopped. Stared blindly at nothing. Then, with a visible hike of his shoulders (Nyx ached afresh; Persephone, too, had always done that,) he went striding down the hall. Shades moved out of his way, instead of simply letting him walk through them.

He stopped, again, at the center of the Great Hall. His eyes darted briefly, tellingly, towards the throne -- the bent head of Hades -- and then, just like that, dismissed him entirely. 

He turned, searching.

And Nyx heard, as clear as if they stood beside her, the memory of her daughters’ voices. _The Lord Hades, god of the dead, will never have an heir._

_The best he can hope for is a son who does not hate him._

_We are blood, but are we not also mettle?_

His eyes landed on Nyx and Achilles. His face cracked wide open, and he lunged for them. 

Achilles caught him first, hugged him hard, said gruffly in his ear, _good work, lad,_ even as he passed him to Nyx, _Did you find her? Your birth mother?_ Nyx held him fast, pressing her cheek against his hair and feeling him say, _I did, sir, yes. I did it, I found her, she’s alive. Nyx, she was -- she was GLAD to see me. Me! Thank you, thank you both. For helping me. For everything._

And the House of Hades, through the goddess Nyx, said unto him, _Child, what else could we do?_

**Persephone.**

She wept. He wept. They hugged and wept together and fell to their knees in the grass. 

Her arms remembered this. Of course they did, they never forgot. The butterflies wove, made dizzy, and the heavy vines fell down, and the clover rioted all across the hill, blooming for joy, for joy, for joy.

*

*

*

*

 **μήτηρ, in the Greek. Mater, in the Latin. Mother, in the way you shelter me.**

*

*

-

fin

**Author's Note:**

> Phew, I remembered a lot more than I thought. Clown hat never comes off, I guess.
> 
> And yes, before you @ me, I KNOW Megaera and Megara are two separate mythological entities. But listen, if Hades game can no-incest (no-sibo? I'm not touching that) Olympian relationships, then I don't have to stick to the book, either.
> 
> I have a [tumblr](https://kaikamahine.tumblr.com/).


End file.
